Heilman is an active clinician who is Director of the Memory Disorders Clinic at UF/Shands, one of the 15 Memory Disorder Clinics supported by the Florida Department of Elder Affairs. This clinic serves those with memory and cognitive disorders, especially those suffering from dementias such as Alzheimer's disease. His expertise as a clinician has been recognized by being listed in virtually every edition of the Best Doctors in America as well as other publications citing clinical excellence.
Research and teaching
Heilman has research interests in attentional, emotional and cognitive disorders. In addition to teaching medical and psychology students, he is active in resident education and been director of the University of Florida Behavioral Neurology Fellowship, that has trained many dozens of post doctoral fellows since its inception in 1976. Several of Heilman's former fellows are now leaders in academic neurology, neuropsychology, speech therapy, and other allied fields. Heilman is the author of several texts, and has authored or co-authored more than 500 articles in peer reviewed journals as well as multiple chapters and fourteen books. His research has been almost continuously funded by federal agencies for the last 35 years. In recognition of his research contributions he was in the first group of individuals to receive the University of Florida Research Foundation Professorships. Heilman also received the Clinical Research Award from the University of Florida College of Medicine. The Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology Society has recognized him with an Outstanding Achievement Award for his research and educational contributions to Neurology. He received the Wartenberg Award from the American Academy of Neurology. He is honorary member of the American Neurological Association and an AAN fellow. One of Heilman's most recent books, on the neurology of creativity, is dedicated to the nearly 100 fellows he has had who have published with him. Heilman is lionized by his former fellows, whose cross collaborations are usually based on one or another of Heilman's creative expressions.
Academic leadership
Heilman has served as president of the International Neuropsychology Society and the Society for Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology.
Research advances
Research advances reported by Heilman and co-workers demonstrated that:
A cortico-limbic-reticular network mediates attention.
In most people, the right hemisphere is dominant for attending to both sides of space.
In most people, it was the right hemisphere of the brain that was important for emotional communication.
Skilled movement, such as tool use, is controlled in most people by a left hemisphere modular network where the parietal lobe contains the representations of the spatial trajectories for these skilled movements, and the frontal lobe transforms this into motor codes.
The Believer's Brain: Home of the Spiritual and Religious Mind: Kenneth M. Heilman and Russell Donda, Psychology Press, 2014.
Matter of Mind: A Neurologist's View of Brain-behavior Relationships: Kenneth M. Heilman, Oxford University Press, 2007.
PGY1: Lessons in Caring: Kenneth M. Heilman, Oxford University Press, 2007.
Creativity and the Brain: Kenneth M. Heilman, Psychology Press, 2005.
Clinical Neuropsychology: Fifth Edition, Kenneth M. Heilman and Edward Valenstein, 2012.
Apraxia Leslis J Gonzalez-Rothi and Kenneth M. Heilman, Taylor & Francis London UK, 1997.
Neuropsychology of Human Emotion: Distinguished Contributions in Psychology, Kenneth M. Heilman & Paul Satz, Guilford Press, 1983.
Handbook for Differential Diagnosis of Neurologic Sign and Symptoms Kenneth M. Heilman, Robert T. Watson, and Melvin Greer, Appleton-Century-Croft, 1977.
