If you are new to Lake Nona, or even if you are a longtime resident, you may not know that a major three-day conference, the Lake Nona Impact Forum, convenes each winter at the KPMG Lakehouse and the Guidewell Center, where the nation’s leading experts gather to discuss the latest developments and innovations in health and wellness. “So what?” you might be thinking.

Well … as the 2026 Impact Forum opened on Wednesday, February 25, Jessi Blakely, Tavistock’s vice president of marketing and communications, turned to a local WESH reporter and said, “When you talk to the attendees here, they do liken [the Impact F0rum] to Aspen and to Davos … so it is important for Central Floridians to know that this is happening here. They should be proud …”

Whoa. That casual remark packs layers of meaning for our modest neighborhood. Where to begin? 

Okay, I admit that the mention of the Davos World Economic Forum piqued my interest. Why? By chance, last May, I traveled to Bern, Switzerland’s capital, to reconnect with old friends and colleagues. One weekend, with no commitments, I ached to visit someplace new. Having lived in Switzerland for many years, my list came up short. The only region I had never studiously explored was Graubünden, the canton dominating the eastern chunk of the Confederation. This is where Davos sits, and I was curious. 

My first step, of course, was to secure hotel reservations. In Davos, I imagined a snug dormer room, perhaps paneled in warm golden birch, in a traditional Swiss inn. Online, though, no such accommodations were available. Was the town busy? Hosting some other major conference? Reluctantly, I settled for a corporate-style stay at the Hilton Garden Inn.

Arriving in Davos, I found the town nearly deserted. Not known to me was that the ski season had just ended, and that summer tourists would not arrive for weeks. This was the Zwischensaison, the in-between season. The Hilton Garden Inn stood across the street from the conference center where the World Economic Forum convenes each winter. It was also the only hotel in town open that week. 

I had imagined Davos as a charming mountain village set amid spectacular alpine scenery. Countless Swiss hamlets fit that description. Davos, though, ain’t one of them. Instead, the town offers an array of mediocre apartment blocks scattered over a nondescript plain beneath a crowded collection of uninspiring mountain peaks. Worse still, the conference center that hosts the World Economic Forum is a grim affair, at least on the outside. Think of a backyard deck writ large, in desperate need of repair, with stained wooden bannisters fading to an unappealing tone of gray. 

But why do I advance such an unkind depiction of Davos? Well, if Lake Nona is to be uttered in the same breath as Davos, we can at least take pride knowing that we live in a a far more attractive town …

For now, though, let’s turn to the substance of this year’s Forum. The Forum agenda listed more than 50 presentations and panel discussions where leading experts addressed a dazzling range of health and wellness topics. An attentive observer could pick out several themes recurring in the discussions, including the rise of AI; the critical role of caregivers; and the importance of family – especially family health crises – in motivating medical innovation.

During three days of information-packed sessions, two speakers in particular stood out: tennis legend Serena Williams and biographer extraordinaire Walter Isaacson.

On Thursday afternoon, Serena Williams strode dramatically onto the stage. For a split second, I imagined Tina Turner returned to life: Serena’s lustrous, curly blond hair spiraled in all directions. In conversation with Dawn Mussallem of Fountain Life, Serena radiated confidence and ease. She spoke candidly about her life journey, noting that tennis was initially her father’s dream before becoming her own. She offered details of her daily routine as a devoted mother focused on raising her two young daughters, in whom she strives to instill a strong sense of humility – while remaining humble herself. As the panel wound down, Serena explained how she became involved in promoting GLP-1 weight loss medication. “I tried everything to lose weight, working at it as much as I possibly could. But nothing worked.” Nothing, that is, until she tried GLP-1. For Serena, this was just a practical decision.

Walter Isaacson’s turn came on Friday morning for an interview with Impact Forum regular, Juju Chang, of ABC News Nightline. “Our nation’s 250^th birthday is just five months away,” Isaacson announced, “so who’s ready for a party?” The audience reacted to this announcement with a chorus of thinly veiled groans. Yes, it seems that our nation’s semiquincentennial won’t garner the same level of enthusiasm as our 1976 bicentennial. Earlier, against this somber mood, Isaacson had decided to produce a book tied tightly to the birth of our nation, a slim volume entitled The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. This was Isaacson’s effort to refocus our attention on specific aspirational text in the Declaration of Independence. The sentence in question, to which Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams all contributed, is this: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” For Isaacson, these 35 words constitute a mission statement for our nation, a set of goals our country has pursued imperfectly. Our 250^th birthday offers an opportunity to reengage with the text of this “greatest sentence.” 

Throughout the Forum, many moderators employed “lightning round” questions, such as “How will AI change our lives over the next 12 months?” Given the vast amount of medical information shared over the three days, let’s try a similar lightning round to identify some of the more newsworthy innovations heard at the Forum. 

• The subject of AI hovered over the conference proceedings like a shadowy cloud. We polarized Americans voters don’t agree about much, but we share a nagging skepticism about the likely benefits that AI will bring to our lives. In a panel on the “new frontiers of technology and life”, Peter Lee, the president of Microsoft Research, and a regular panelist at the Forum, worked to calm the public’s anxiety about AI. “People don’t realize the potential of AI,” for bettering our lives, he insisted. AI apps for certain sectors, such as farming, will arrive soon, while AI agents will accelerate research as they usher in an era of software abundance. 
• A panel entitled, “Rewiring Life: AI and Brain Health”, addressed the troubling ways that the Internet, smartphones and now AI are reshaping our brains. Smartphones, whose algorithms provide us with information and entertainment in short bursts, are physically changing our brains to resemble those altered by addiction. Most people can’t last more than 25 minutes without looking at their phone. What to do? For Natalya Kosmyna of MIT’s Media Lab, we need to “break one auto loop each day … and practice micro-rituals to reawaken human connections” to reduce our psychological dependence on smartphones. In doing so, Kosmyna tells us, we can “learn to love boredom again.”
• On Thursday morning, Tavistock senior managing director Rasesh Thakkar interviewed former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who served in that job during the first Trump administration. Pompeo spent much time describing our rivalry with China. “What do Americans misunderstand about the global order?” Thakkar asked. Pompeo replied that “a world without the leadership of the United States would be a disaster; there is no number 2 country” that could take on that role. In this reporter’s view, however, recent events have raised serious questions about the leadership role of the United States in global affairs.  
• One panel, featuring Beth Shapiro of Colossal Biosciences, discussed the new field of de-extinction. Much has been written about plans by scientists to bring woolly mammoths back to life – a goal now technically possible. Already, Colossal Biosciences has resurrected pups of the extinct dire wolf. We were especially tickled, though, by photos of mice with thick coats of orange woolly fur. That fur was produced by extracting DNA from frozen woolly mammoths, a first step, it is thought, for bringing a woolly mammoth back to life. But serious challenges remain. For example, woolly mammoths’ gestation period is 22 months, similar to that of elephants, the species which Colossal Biosciences hopes can serve as a surrogate mother. In a couple of years, will Impact Forum attendees see photos of living, de-extinct mammoths?
• Small surprises abounded at this Forum. One panelist explained how video games are now being used to train medical personnel. Another panelist, the Barbadian-born rapper Doug E. Fresh, described his work teaching children how to identify and deal with serious life-threatening symptoms in older members of their families … through hip hop songs he writes specifically for that purpose. 
• Perhaps one of the most eye-opening panels was “Astonishing Frontiers in Reproductive Health.” Maybe others have followed the latest advances in this field, but much of the information shared was brand new to your reporter. Did I know that there are now artificial wombs? Or that sperm can be created from a woman’s body, and eggs can be extracted from a man? Or that both egg and sperm can be produced by a single person? The panelists addressed the moral and ethical questions arising from these scientific advances. The future projected nearly 100 years ago in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is suddenly upon us.

So that’s a thumbnail sketch of just some of the mounds of information exchanged at this year’s Impact Forum. Let’s close with a few thoughts about comparing Davos, Aspen, and Lake Nona.

Is it fair to compare the Lake Nona Impact Forum with the Davos and Aspen conferences? That question is not so far-fetched. Several Impact Forum attendees have also spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos and the Aspen Ideas Festival. Examples are Bill and Chelsea Clinton, Sanjay Gupta, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Jeff Bezos, and soprano Renée Fleming. And Walter Isaacson actually once served as the CEO of the Aspen Institute. So there’s that crossover in participation and presence.

Like the Davos and Aspen events, the Lake Nona Impact Forum offers attendees a place for leading experts to share information and ideas related to their fields. For Lake Nona, these fields are medicine, health, and wellness. But the Davos and Aspen conferences, each of which attracts over 3,000 participants (about 750 invitees attend the Lake Nona Impact Forum), address a much broader range of disciplines. For Davos, these include geopolitics, economics, technology, the environment, and social progress. The Aspen Ideas Festival addresses all these topics plus education, journalism, the arts, and philanthropy. 

One way to approach this question of comparison is to regard the Lake Nona Impact Forum as a junior partner to the Davos and Aspen conferences. A reasonable view, since the Internet tells us that the Impact Forum was modeled after those two conferences.

Which leaves us with one final thought. Clearly, the Impact Forum benefits its invited experts and guests, whose enthusiasm for the event seems to grow with each passing year. But how does the Impact Forum benefit the Lake Nona community itself? In my experience, only the rare local Lake Nona resident has even heard of the Impact Forum. (I regularly ask neighbors that question.)

So a key first step would be to raise awareness of the Impact Forum locally. We are pleased to see that the Forum is attracting more attention online, on television, and on social media. Greater public awareness of the importance of the Impact Forum – locally, around Central Florida, and beyond – can only help to instill a genuine sense of pride in our community. And that pride, together with wider visibility for the Forum, should bring real benefit to our community. Put us on the map, so to speak. Because yes, the Lake Nona Impact Forum is a really big deal.