IHMC breaks ground on 44K SF building connecting Pensacola's historic and downtown districts

The Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition broke ground Friday on its $30 million Center for Human Healthspan, Resilience and Performance building in downtown Pensacola.

The expansion of IHMC's campus will add a four-story, 44,000-square-foot facility on South Alcaniz Street. The footprint of building will be in what is now a vacant lot on East Garden Street, with the facility bordering Garden Street.

The research center already occupies both a two-story and a three-story building the next city block over on South Alcaniz and East Romana streets, but this expansion would extend to another block, creating a more campus-like feel that also includes a parking lot, an outdoor field for clinical trials and outdoor greenery space.

"Certainly the addition of complex will bolster the regional economy with new jobs and raise and increase federal and industrial sponsored research in our region," IHMC’s founder and CEO Ken Ford said at Friday's groundbreaking. “This facility, and the people housed in it, really will be one-of-a-kind, and it will be a reputational jewel for our community and region.”

Building plans:IHMC $20 million campus expansion takes another step forward, could be complete by early 2024

What's next?IHMC expanding research into human health and performance

The design of the building is similar to IHMC's Levin Center on East Romana Street.

The expansion of IHMC will allow the research institute to expand its efforts into human health and performance, along with the research into artificial intelligence and robotics that it has conducted since its founding in 1990.

According to IHMC, the Healthspan, Resilience and Performance complex will be a leading-edge lab and office building that will create a research hub studying not just how people can live longer, but how we can live better.

IHMC won a $6 million Triumph Gulf Coast grant in 2021 to kickstart its research into human health and performance. Triumph nearly doubled that grant to $12 million in 2022 to build on the program's early success.

The research institution has already had about a dozen employees working on the subject since earlier this year. The new building will allow the institute to triple the size of that team over the next five years.

Completion is scheduled for early 2024.

"This exciting new research complex in the heart of historic downtown Pensacola will enable continuous interactions and frequent collisions of people and ideals across many academic disciplines," Ford said. "IHMC is fundamentally a habitat for innovation."

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Human Healthspan, Resilience and Performance lab construction begins