 Great. Thank you, Rudy. I just want to emphasize, as Rudy pointed out, we are delighted to continue to bring our council meetings live through videocast. We also archive all of this so that we can share not only the proceedings, but also the associated documents that are presented during the open session with the larger community. That includes my director's report, which has an extra associated electronic resource associated with it. As I always explain, it's analogous to a supplemental materials of a published paper. You can access all a whole host of documents and URLs and so forth at the URL actually shown on this slide. We also are making this entire slide set available electronically, either in PDF form or as the actual PowerPoint file. For slides that are associated with supplemental materials, there'll be a document number in the bottom right-hand corner, which references materials that can be accessed or downloaded from the web page indicated by this URL. And as I mentioned earlier, all this is being video archived as well and will be part of a historic record of this meeting. Now, by sheer coincidence, I will tell you that we have an unusually light open session and a light open session agenda today. In fact, there's only one other formal presentation and beyond my director's report. Specifically, immediately after my talk, Dr. Elisael Perez-Stabley will join us as the new director of the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities, or NIMHD. In particular, he's going to discuss his vision and agenda for NIMHD and the common ground that exists between that institute and NHGRI. And I know that council members were interested in hearing from Elisael, and I'm glad we were able to schedule him for this presentation today. Beyond that, for the other aspects of the open session, just don't get too spoiled with such a light agenda. I can already warn you that we will all pay a price for this and that the September council meeting, including this open session, is shaping up to be a very busy one. So just before warned, we will, you will pay at the other end of the summer for this easier council meeting today. So my director's report will follow these seven general areas that have served us well over now multiple years, and starting with some general NHGRI updates. And there actually is only one general NHGRI update to talk about, and it relates to one of our senior leaders, but it's something actually outside of the realm of genomics. Now, as some of you know, Dr. Betty Graham, who's director of the Division of Extramural Operations, competes in fencing at the national and international level. And as it turns out, she's like really, really good, okay? So at the North American Cup veteran epi competition last month, Betty competed in the women's age 70 and older group, sorry, Betty, we gave away a little information about you, winning bronze in the epi and silver in the foil, barely missing out on the gold medal in a 10 to eight final match. Now, shown here as a photograph from a recent Washington post story that highlights Betty's, yes, Washington post story highlighting Betty's famous fencing accomplishment. And in fact, that article can be found at the document number that's indicated. By the way, in 2011, Betty won the gold medal for her age group at the national epi championship. So for any of you with plans on swashbuckling with Betty about some difficult issue or problem, I warn you that she really knows what she is doing and if she is likely to slice you up during that debate. But actually, one other point I wanted to make besides congratulating Betty for this is that I'll let counsel in on a little secret that we know internally, but you may not know is that there's actually a double meeting for the PhD after her name. Of course, she earned her doctorate degree as a doctor of philosophy. But the secret double meeting associated with it is that it also means that she is a fencing diva. So, so congratulations, Betty. Okay, moving on. Nothing was going to top that for NHGRI update. So we're going to need to move on to the NIH. Lots to tell you about at the NIH level, though, starting off in some breaking news that came from last week, but we've been waiting for for some time. Dr. Patty Brennan has been selected to be the new director of the National Library of Medicine or NLM. Dr. Brennan comes from a combined nursing and engineering background and has an outstanding record of accomplishment in multiple areas, including biomedical informatics with particular expertise and accomplishments in consumer health informatics. Since 1996, she's been the professor of nursing and of industrial engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And at that university, she spearheaded multiple major research initiatives, including those in dated visualization and virtual reality that are really quite relevant to leading NLM at this time. Dr. Brennan will join NLM in late summer, aiming to begin the process of implementing a series of recommendations made by the working group of the advisory committee to the NIH director that formulated a renewed vision for NLM. And I'm extremely excited because, by the way, I both chaired that working group and also co-chaired the search committee for the NLM directorship. And I'm extremely excited about her arrival and I'm working closely with her to advance NLM's mission specifically and data science more broadly at NIH. And we certainly have plans of bringing Patty here to counsel for a presentation shortly after her arrival. In another important recruitment, Dr. Matthew Gilman has been selected as the first director of the new Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes, or ECHO, program. ECHO is a seven-year NIH initiative that aims to use large existing study cohorts to conduct research on high-impact pediatric health outcomes. Dr. Gilman comes to NIH from Boston, where he is professor of population medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Gilman will begin at NIH in July of 2016. Colleen Barras, who's the NIH deputy director for management, has been on detail at the Department of Health and Human Services serving as the acting assistant secretary for administration since last August. She is now losing the acting title and will serve as the assistant secretary for administration, meaning that she will be formally departing NIH. Since 2004, Colleen has played a vital role in overseeing many different administrative management aspects of NIH most recently as the deputy director for management under Dr. Francis Collins. Meanwhile, Dr. JJ McGowan will continue to serve as acting deputy director for management until a permanent deputy director is identified, and that search will begin in the near future. While not at NIH, but have certainly have major relevance to NIH, Dr. Rob Califf was finally confirmed as the new commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA. As FDA's top official, Dr. Califf will focus on strengthening programs and policies that enable the agency to carry out its mission to protect and promote the public health. A well known figure in medicine is a cardiologist and researcher at Duke University. He has actively been working at FDA since February of 2015 when he took on the role as deputy commissioner for medical products and tobacco. NHGRI certainly looks forward to interacting with Dr. Califf as we continue to build stronger partnership partnerships with the FDA. In his January 12th State of the Union address, President Obama announced his early plans to cure cancer and to put Vice President Joe Biden in charge of mission control for the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative. Since that time, the Obama administration has elaborated on its goals, which include reducing the time to important discoveries by increasing the spending on cancer research, breaking down data silos, and increasing collaboration among scientists in different sectors. The president is seeking $1 billion of additional funding from Congress that aims to support cancer vaccine development, early cancer detection, immunotherapy and combination therapies, genomic profiling of tumor and surrounding cells, and the promising areas, and other promising areas of cancer research. If interested, you can sign up for updates about the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative on the National Cancer Institute's website. In March, the journal Science published a letter describing NIH's continued commitment to the funding of basic science research. Coauthored by the collective NIH leadership, including myself, this letter aimed to address some of the concerns of the research community that NIH's funding decisions overly prioritize research that has an immediate connection to public health. The letter entitled Basic Science Bedrock of Progress describes the ongoing commitment of NIH to support basic research. As stated in the letter, quote, many of the most important medical advances traced back to basic research that had no explicit disease link, end of quote. NHGRI certainly agrees with the sentiment expressed in this letter, which is why I did not hesitate to be a co-author on this paper. Turning our attention to the important congressional legislation and all of its associated news, since February of 2016, the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions or HELP Committee has marked up 19 bills that seek to enhance the U.S. investments in biomedical research, biomedical innovation, and healthcare. These Senate bills represent companion legislation to the House's 21st Century Cures Act, which was passed last summer, and this thus reflects the Senate Cures agenda, if you will. Now, all 19 Cures bills have been referred out to committee and will be considered by the full Senate. Several of these bills would directly affect NIH, including a proposal to improve support for young investigators, a proposal to enhance representation of minorities and women in federally funded research, and a proposal that would grant the Department of Health and Human Services Secretary's statutory authorization to carry out activities for the Precision Medicine Initiative. Another proposal that remains undecided is the establishment of a large innovation fund for NIH. The House's 21st Century Cures Act calls for a similar fund as well as an additional $8.75 billion increase in NIH's budget over five years. The next task for the Senate Help Committee will be to determine the budget for its Cures agenda. Among the Cures legislation passed by the Senate Help Committee was the Genetic Research Privacy Protection Act. Now, this bill sponsored by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Mike Enzi seeks to establish privacy protections for individuals who contribute identifiable or reidentifiable information, such as, but not limited to, genomic information, to federally funded research efforts, such as the Precision Medicine Initiative. It does so by making certificates of confidentiality mandatory and granting FOIA exemptions for identifiable information. It is important to note that this bill, along with the others I mentioned on the previous slide, must still pass the full Senate and House and then receive the President's approval before becoming law. Moving on, then, to the topic of great interest, the NIH budget. Well, recall that in fiscal year 2016, NIH received a $2 billion budget increase. As depicted on the middle column of this table, that provided a total of $32.3 billion to NIH and $513.2 million to NHGRI. In February, the President announced his fiscal year 2017 budget proposal, with the relevant numbers shown in the far right column. The President proposed an increase for NIH funding to $33.1 billion, but the additional funds were almost exclusively intended for activities related to the Precision Medicine Initiative, the Brain Initiative, and the National Cancer Moonshop. In fact, the fiscal year 2017 budget request for NHGRI would keep us flat at $513.2 million. Numerous debates are now taking place about how to further increase the NIH budget through discretionary and or mandatory funds. For fiscal year 2017, the President has proposed increasing NIH's mandatory funding while cutting its discretionary funding. Mandatory funding is required by statute, whereas discretionary funding is determined every year through the appropriations process. Mandatory funding, however, requires a pay for to be identified, and finding that pay for is not guaranteed. Well, during the last or the past several sessions, Congress has been unable to identify such a pay for. So, advocates and congressional members are worried that any proposals with a mandatory increase will be difficult to pass, as fiscal conservators are already critical of burgeoning mandatory spending. Advocates are also concerned that NIH could actually end up with less money if no pay for is found. So, many congressional members are divided over which approval to support, and that's the state of affairs as it exists now. So, moving on to more general genomics updates, starting with some awards and honors. So, Dr. Eric Lander has been awarded the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, 2015 Philip A. Abelson Prize for advancing science in society through his extraordinary contributions for science, for his ability to explain science to the public and students, and for his work bringing science to bear in serving the public. As most of you know, Dr. Lander is president and founding director of the Eli and Edith L. Brode Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Harvard University. He was a key leader of the Human Genome Project and also now serves as co-chair of the President's Council on Advisors on Science and Technology. The 2016 Canadian Gardner Awards were recently announced. Among this year's awardees are NIAID director, Dr. Tony Fauci, who was given the 2016 Canada Gardner Global Health Award for his many pioneering contributions to our understanding of HIV infections and his extraordinary leadership in bringing successful treatment to the developing world. The Canada Gardner Global Health Award is given to a scientist who advances have or will potentially have a significant impact on health outcomes in the developing world. And then the trios of Dr. Feng Zhang, Jennifer Dowdow and Emanuel Sharpent here received the Canada Gardner International Award for Development of CRISPR, CAS, as the genome editing tool for eukaryotic cells. The Canada Gardner International Awards are given to biomedical researchers who have made original contributions to medicine resulting in increased understanding of human biology and disease. Congratulations to all of these awardees. Similarly, congratulations are deserved for Dr. Sue Selniker of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab who's been awarded the Genetic Society of America's 2016 George W. Beedle Award for her outstanding contributions to the Drosophila research community. Dr. Selniker has been a longtime NHGRI grantee, including working on the modding code and other Drosophila resource projects. Her efforts were critical to ensuring that the Drosophila genome sequence was well annotated. Dr. Gil McVean, a director and founder of Genetics PLC and also director of the Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford, has been elected a fellow of the Royal Society. We know Gil as a well respected genomics researcher and a key leader of the HAPMAP and 1000 Genomes Project. The Royal Society fellows represent the most eminent scientists, engineers, and technologists in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. And sort of our equivalent on this side of the ocean, two weeks ago the National Academy of Sciences announced their newly elected members of particular relevance to the genomics community and to NHGRI, our individuals listed here, and we extend our heartfelt congratulations to this impressive group. And now for some comings and goings of a number of NHGRI and genomics colleagues, NHGRI's good friend, grantee, and former council member Dr. Rick Lifton will be departing Yale University after many years to become the 11th president of the Rockefeller University. Dr. Lifton is a well respected physician scientist with a distinguished research career in human genetics and genomics. He has done a terrific job as chairman of the Department of Genetics at Yale University and will now have the opportunity to use those leadership skills in leading the Rockefeller University. And after serving 14 years as the director of the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute, or JGI, Dr. Eddie Rubin will be stepping down from this role later this year. Once, as soon as a new JGI director is identified, Dr. Rubin will become chief scientific officer, a meta-biota, a big data analytics company focused on infectious diseases and epidemic risk. Another good friend of the institutes after 29 years, Dr. Jan Wodkowski, is stepping down as director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Banbury Center. Jan has been instrumental in developing the Center's robust meetings program, having helped NHGRI and the genomics community conduct multiple important meetings at this site. He plans to stay at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and undertake a number of new projects including working on compiling the history of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The MIT technology review recently announced its top 10 breakthrough technologies for 2016. Among this group of 10 were two from the genomics field, specifically precise genome editing in plants using CRISPR and the DNA app store for accessing information about your genes. The magazine Modern Healthcare recently conducted a survey of its readers seeking their input about the top advance in healthcare over the past 40 years. Remarkably, the readers concluded that quote, the sequencing of the human genome represents the most significant breakthrough in healthcare over the past 40 years. To celebrate its 20th anniversary, the journal Nature Biotechnology recently published a special issue celebrating two decades of the science and business of biotechnology. A number of NHGRI supported research projects were highlighted, including those related to detecting somatic variants in cancer, assembling transcriptomes, predictive metagenomics, and the use of nanopores for DNA sequencing. And of course we always have a feature on genomes in the news, and there have been a number of recently completed ungenerated genome sequences reported since the last council meeting, including the bed bug, the cheetah, the spotted gar, a 430,000-year-old hominin, the filter-feeding Mediterranean mussel, the Atlantic Salmon, California Island foxes, and yet more Galapagos finches. So go find those in GenBank. Moving on then to our extramural research program, lots to talk about. I will start with the recently renewed NHGRI genome sequencing program, or GSP. The key GSP participants gathered at a program meeting in April. Participants discussed a range of issues, including identify areas of collaboration, and also outlining how data is going to be, data sharing will occur. Also discussed were the main scientific directions for both the Centers for Mendelian Genomics and the Centers for Common Disease Genomics programs over the next four years. Over 90 individuals participated in this meeting, including grantees, external advisors, NHGRI staff, and staff from other institutes at NIH, such as the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the National Institute on Aging, the National Eye Institute, and the National Institute on Mental Health. We plan to convene the entire GSP group annually to ensure that the direction of this multifaceted program is well calibrated and coordinated. NHGRI's technology development program has several active funding opportunities that deserve highlighting. There are active requests for applications for novel nucleic acid sequencing technology development for both DNA and direct RNA sequencing. The first round of applications will be considered later at this council meeting. There are also upcoming application due dates in July of this year and in June of 2017. Meanwhile, program announcements for novel genome technology development yielded the first round of applications that are now under review and will be considered by council in September. There's also an upcoming application dates specifically in October of 2016 and then again October in 2017. Moving on to our ENCODE program, the goal of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements or ENCODE project is to create catalogs of all functional elements in the human and mouse genomes and to make those catalogs available as a resource to the biomedical community. ENCODE regularly engages in outreach activities to help a broad range of scientists use ENCODE resources. The second ENCODE users meeting will take place in June, modeled after the highly successful 2015 meeting. Consortium members will lead interactive tutorials demonstrating how to access ENCODE data, tools, and resources to run ENCODE processing pipelines and to perform integrative analyses of ENCODE data. In addition, a panel of researchers not involved in ENCODE will explain how ENCODE resources are enabling their own work. An analysis of co-authorship network of ENCODE and modern code consortium was recently published in actually I'll take back to that, recently published in Trends and Genetics. The analysis found that consortium members appeared to function as a community and a few consortium members played key roles in outreach. A suggestion from this analysis is that large scientific consortium should include formal outreach efforts. ENCODE data continue to be heavily used. As you'll see from these cumulative graphs, there are now more than 1,450 community publications, that's the pink line, from groups without ENCODE funding but who used ENCODE data for their published work. ENCODE consortium members have now produced more than 550 publications shown in an accumulative form in the green line. Aiming to build on the success of ENCODE, NHGRI has released and received applications for five funding opportunity announcements or FOAs in functional genomics, all of which will be organized under the general ENCODE umbrella. These FOAs will support functional genomics projects with a variety of goals including expanding the catalog of candidate functional elements through high throughput mapping in the human and mouse genomes, developing generalized approaches for characterizing the role of candidate functional elements in specific biological contexts, developing new computational approaches for analyzing ENCODE data, making ENCODE data readily available to the research community through coordinated data management activities, and supporting the centralized data analysis needs of the next phase of ENCODE, including developing updated and refined versions of the ENCODE encyclopedia. The key dates associated with these FOAs are shown here, applications were received in March with scientific merit review occurring this summer, advisory council review in September, and then the anticipated project start date in February of next year. Moving on, the electronic medical records and genomics or a merge network, now in its third phase, conducts genomic discovery and clinical implementation research by leveraging data from large biorepositories linked to electronic medical records. A recent study published in Science used ENCODE data, I mean ENCODE, and merged data to explore the phenotypic legacy of human Neanderthal inbreeding and found that alleles with Neanderthal origins were associated with many human phenotypes such as depression, skin lesions due to sun exposure, hypercoagulation, and tobacco use. This publication was covered by several popular media outlets including Science Magazine, NPR's All Things Considered, and newspapers across the country such as the Los Angeles Times and the Seattle Times. Nearly 40 Emerge investigators recently presented at the American Medical Informatics Association, their joint summits on translational science meeting. These presentations included a panel on the practical implementation of genome sequencing in healthcare settings, podium presentations on genetic association studies using electronic medical record data, online knowledge base of lessons learned for clinical decision, support implementation, as well as posters. The clinical sequence in exploratory research or CSER program focuses on the integration of genome sequencing into the clinical workflow, including the generation interpretation and clinical reporting of genomic information. CSER has now enrolled nearly 4500 adults and almost 1200 children. For more than 4,000 of these individuals, germline genome sequencing has been generated and for nearly 800 tumor genome sequence data have been generated. As one measure of overall impact, CSER has now generated 231 publications, including 16 cross CSER working group publications. Three recent papers can be readily highlighted. First, the actionability and return of results working group published a genomic variant bake off analysis of the interlaboratory concordance of 99 genomic variants using standard American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics criteria. Consensus discussions to refine the use of these criteria doubled the concordance of variance interpretation from 34% to 71%. The CSER consortium also published a marker paper that highlights the growth development and successes of the CSER program to date. As an example of a single site publication, the Baylor College of Medicine basic three study recently identified diagnostic and or potentially actionable findings in nearly 40% of newly diagnosed pediatric patients with solid tumors. At the recent 2016 American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics meeting, members of the CSER consortium presented and participated in 25 different posters, short courses, and panels. One panel which focused on the pros and cons of direct to consumer genetic testing featured two CSER consortium members, doctors Jim Evans and Robert Green. CSER investigators also co-led two basic courses entitled tools and approaches to assess the genetic basis of disease and advanced molecular cancer genetics state of the art today and beyond. Finally, as a follow-up to the CSER II concept discussion held during the February council meeting, three requests for applications or RFAs were released earlier this month. The receipt dates for all three RFAs are August 5th for non-AIDS applications and September 7th for AIDS applications. The implementing genomics in practice or IGNITE network strives to develop methods for incorporating genomic information into medical care and promote the effective use of genetics and genomics in various healthcare settings. To date IGNITE sites and working groups have generated 36 publications. On August 18th of this year the IGNITE network along with collaborations from other programs in the Division of Genomic Medicine will host a genomic medicine payer engagement meeting to engage insurance payers, healthcare providers, technology researchers and manufacturers, and clinical genomics consumers. The meeting also aims to determine what studies will benefit the community. The meeting's goals include discussing the barriers to genomic medicine implementation and crafting opportunities and strategies to promote sustainable solutions for access to clinical genomic testing. Shortly thereafter we will host a program review meeting entitled IGNITE and Beyond the Future of Genomic Medicine Implementation on August 30th. The meeting's goals include evaluating the contributions of IGNITE to genomic medicine and defining future challenges and opportunity in clinical genomics implementation. The meeting will be webcast live and archived on Genome TV channel of YouTube. The clinical genome resource or ClinGen is building a central resource that defines the clinical relevance of genes and genomic variants for use in precision medicine and research. ClinGen is in its third year of funding and has made significant progress in developing and implementing standards for curating clinical validity, variant pathogenicity and actionability. ClinGen's website has been redesigned to more prominently feature a search interface that returns the results of their curation efforts. Additional improvements allow visitors to more readily find information about ClinGen's working groups, tools and resources. Examples of some of these tools and resources include the ClinGen Patient Registry Genome Connect, the Pathogenicity Calculator that enables evaluation of pathogenicity according to the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics and the American College of Pathology Guidelines and the ClinGen data model documentation. ClinGen was highly visible at the 2016 ACMG meeting earlier this spring. ClinGen investigators led a short course describing available tools to access genomic basis of disease and were chosen to give numerous platform and poster presentations. Lastly, the annual ClinGen reception had over 100 attendees. This year, the reception focused on capturing feedback from ClinGen users and discussing the need for additional expert review panels to submit data to ClinVar. The newborn sequencing and genomic medicine and public health, or NSITE program, is exploring in a limited but deliberative manner the implications, challenges, and opportunities associated with the possible use of genomic sequence information for the care of newborns. Recently, NSITE investigators published a bioethical issues in pediatric special supplement entitled ethical issues in genomic testing of children. This special issue of the journal Pediatrics is a first look at some of the ethical issues the investigators have encountered in the NSITE projects, including articles entitled the challenge of analyzing the results of next generation sequencing in children, supporting parental decisions about genomic sequencing for newborn screening, the North Carolina nexus decision aid, psychosocial factors, influencing parental interest in genome sequencing of newborns, and parental views on expanded newborn screening using whole genome sequencing. Last month, the Genomic Medicine Working Group of this council actually held the ninth genomic medicine meeting. The focus of the meeting was to facilitate the interactions between the bench and the bedside by focusing on one of the most vaccine problems in clinical genomics, that is characterizing and interpreting genomic variants of uncertain significance. Objectives of this meeting included reviewing examples of successful interactions between basic scientists and clinical genomicists and exploring what made them successful, identifying ways to enhance communications between basic scientists and clinical genomicists, a.k.a. the virtuous cycle of bench to bedside and back again, and integrating basic science research efforts with clinically important questions to enhance the exploration of clinical implications of basic discoveries. Additional topic areas covered included how basic science lends insights into disease mechanisms to facilitate effective approaches for understanding the function of variants of uncertain significance and relevance to disease mechanisms, computational and informatic approaches to prediction and annotation of genomic variant function, efforts and strategies for data integration through the development and implementation of biomedical ontologies and facilitating bench side back to bench research. I'll point out that a complete video recording of the meeting, also the meeting summary and also slides presented at the meeting are being made available on genome.gov. Moving on then, the NHGRI Computational Genomics and Data Science Program will be holding two important meetings in the coming months that we want to make you aware of. The first of these will actually be held next week and aims to identify and discuss new organizational models for model organism databases and the gene ontology consortium. Such a new model or models is expected to improve collaborations and interoperability of these resources by leveraging common activities and services that are now provided independently. The organizing committee is composed of Drs. Alex Bateman, Councilmember Carol Bolt and Paul Thomas, as well as NHGRI staff. The invited participants include the model organism databases and the gene ontology consortium, PIs and key personnel. NHGRI Council members, Drs. Carol Bolt, Mark Johnston and Howard Jacob will also participate together with other independent external advisors, including Dr. Jim Ostel from the National Center for Biotechnology Information, Dr. Owen White from the University of Maryland and Dr. Paul Cursey from the European Bioinformatics Institute. Other participants will include NHGRI staff as well as staff as well as staff involved in NIHY discussions of long-term sustainability of data resources. We plan to report the findings of this meeting at the September 2016 Council meeting. So look forward to that. The second meeting of the of an informatics planning is an informatics planning workshop that will be held in September of this year. The main goal of this workshop is to develop a plan to expand and strengthen the NHGRI extramural computational and data science portfolio over the next five to 10 years. This may include potential new initiatives, changes to current NHGRI funding opportunities and recommendations for future funding strategies for both solicited and unsolicited research projects. Members of the organizing committee for this workshop are Drs. Michael Benke, Carol Boldt, Trey Idaker, Aviva Gev, and Lincoln Stein as well as NHGRI staff. And once again, we plan to report the findings of this workshop at a future Council meeting in this case, it'll be reported at the February 2017 Council meeting. As you know, NHGRI is a long-term commitment to preparing the next generation of genome scientists and scholars and thus we continue to enhance our investment in research training and career development programs. As part of this enhancement, NHGRI expanded the format for its annual training meeting to include all full-time trainees not just the PIs and training coordinators of institutional grants as was the case in previous meetings. The inaugural NHGRI research training and career development meeting was held in April. Trainees included undergraduate, post-baccalaureate graduate students and post-doctoral fellows supported on either individual fellowships or institutional T32 or diversity action plan or DAP grants as well as career development awardees and NHGRI intramural trainees. There were 230 participants of these 162 were trainees which represents a majority of the NHGRI funded trainees. This meeting provided a venue for trainees in genomic sciences, genomic medicine and genomics and society areas to present their research and to form collaborations with other trainees and established investigators. Trainees were able to present posters and give talks as well as listen to professional development and scientific presentations. Initial feedback during the meeting was very positive and surveys have been sent out to help improve next year's meeting. Last month the existing data analysis and coordinating center or DAC was competitively renewed for another five years. The PIs are Dr. Triva Rice and Donna Jeffey at Washington University. The DAC will maintain and improve the current red cap training database and continue to collect and analyze data about trainee career paths. The DAC will also provide logistical support for future annual training meeting program meetings. An expanded activity of the DAC will be to track and evaluate all trainees including those on individual fellowships and career development awards as well as ELSI program trainees and not just grant trainees on existing DAP and T32 grants. For our diversity action plan or DAP program NHRI remains committed to increasing the pool of individuals from diverse backgrounds who have training to pursue a wide variety of genomics related careers. Therefore NHRI will reissue the DAP program announcement to provide funding opportunities for this purpose. The announcement is expected to be published this summer but the first application receipt date expected in the fall. And lastly all of our current set of 12 T32 programs are focused in the area of genome sciences. Our effort to expand the program is now taking hold. New genomic medicine and ELSI ethical legal social application T32 training grants will be added to the program and notices of awards are expected to be issued for these in late spring or early summer. So moving beyond NHRI to more broadly the NIH Common Fund and trans NIH initiatives starting with microbiome research various developments relevant to the Common Funds human microbiome project deserve mention. With advances in human microbiome research the National Institute of Standards and Technology or NIST along with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Human Microbiome Project will be holding a workshop to develop reference standards and standard operating procedures for microbiome community measurements. This workshop will take place in August. Now at the last council meeting I gave an update about the Office of Science and Technology Policy or OSTP's Fast Track Action Committee on mapping the microbiome. In February OSTP chartered the Microbiome Interagency Working Group to implement a federal wide microbiome initiative. And then in some very late-breaking news actually from last Friday the White House announced such a national microbiome initiative and I plan to report on this new initiative and its implementation at future council meetings. Finally the Trans NIH Microbiome Working Group which has representatives from 18 institutes and centers is organizing a three-day meeting in August of 2017 at NIH to discuss future needs for the field. This meeting will also highlight the human microbiome project's contributions as well as microbiome research supported by various NIH institutes and centers. Moving on the Library of Integrated Network-Based Cellular Signatures or LINX program aims to create a network-based understanding of biology by cataloging changes in gene expression and other cellular processes that occur when cells are exposed to a variety of perturbing agents. LINX uses computational tools to integrate the diverse information into a comprehensive view of normal and disease states that can be applied to the development of new biomarkers and therapeutics. LINX had its first outreach meeting in March in Irvine, California over 50 external researchers participated. Preliminary feedback from follow-up surveys indicate that it was very well received. Workers ongoing to determine subsequent steps both on future outreach efforts as well as on improving data content, presentation, and access. The first LINX data challenge has opened for registration. It is a collaboration between the LINX program and the Crowd Innovation Lab at Harvard. The goal of the challenge is to build better inference models for all transcripts. This will enable LINX to support a wide or array of queries from the community. NIH is now starting to receive grant applications from non-LINX scientists that utilize LINX resources. The program intends to track this on a long-term basis. Moving on, the goals of the protein capture reagents program are to pilot the development of a community resource of low-cost, high-quality, renewable affinity reagents for human transcription factor proteins and to develop technologies for next-generation platforms. The initial grantee phase with an emphasis on technology development will be completed this summer with one remaining grantee at Johns Hopkins University finishing production of mouse monoclonal antibodies to human transcription factors. With the grantee phase near completion, the program is now entering a contract phase. Over 1,700 antibodies have been produced throughout the course of this program. Because of the well-known difficulties with the reliability of commercially available antibodies, the Common Fund seeks an independent third-party assessment of about 500 of these antibodies via a contract mechanism. Towards that end, a request for proposals was released last month to address this goal. Such independent validations will also add value to the existing reagents and provide another method of outreach to establish usefulness of these reagents for the biomedical research community. The Human Heredity and Health in Africa or H3Africa Central Goal is to develop a sustainable and collaborative African Genetics and Genomics Research Enterprise. This past March, the H3Africa Community Engagement Working Group met in Stellenbosch, South Africa for a Welcome Trust sponsored workshop focusing on strategies for tracking and evaluating community engagement activities. Members of each H3Africa project attended and participated in what were fruitful and active discussions. And then the eighth H3Africa Consortium Meeting came to a close actually yesterday in Dakar, Senegal after four days of working group sessions, workshops and presentations. Some highlights included a report on the H3Africa Custom Genotyping Chip, which is expected to be in general production early this fall. An editors led publication workshop in which editors from Global Health, Epidemiology and Genomics, the New England Journal of Medicine, Nature and Science participated and a sustainability panel featuring stakeholders representing both government and non-governmental organizations across the continent. And this session was held on a joint day between the H3Africa Meeting and the African Society of Human Genetics Meeting that followed. Several NIH program staff and project members are still in Senegal, as you might imagine, attending the ongoing African Society of Human Genetics Meeting. Looking forward, H3Africa has now been renewed by the NIH Common Fund for a second five years, starting in 2017. Funding Opportunity Announcements or FOAs will come out in the coming months and those applications will be coming to this Council on next May. The Undiagnosed Diseases Network or UDN aims to improve the level of diagnosis and care for patients with undiagnosed diseases, facilitate research into the etiology of these diseases and create an integrated and collaborative research community to identify and share improved options for optimal patient management. To date, the UDN has received over 500 applications and accepted 185 patients for evaluation at the seven UDN clinical sites across the nation. To apply for the program, one can simply access the UDN gateway by clicking on the Apply button shown here which is located on any of the UDN web pages or by going to the URL apply.undiagnosed.hms.harvard.edu. Finally, on March 21st, the Future Directions for Undiagnosed Diseases Research, the UDN and Beyond Workshop was held convening a group of stakeholders to review thoughts about the UDN to formulate recommendations about a possible continuation of the program. The video recording of that workshop can be accessed on genome.gov. Moving beyond the Common Fund and more to a TransNIH initiative, we move to the Precision Medicine Initiative which I've kept this council updated about on a regular basis. The cohort component of this now has a leader. Eric Dishman has been selected to be the first permanent director of the Precision Medicine Initiative or PMI cohort program. As I've discussed extensively at previous council meetings, the PMI cohort program aims to recruit a million or more U.S. volunteers to participate in a longitudinal cohort study, thereby creating a research resource for expanding our ability to improve health and treat disease through precision medicine. Eric Dishman comes to the NIH from his current position as vice president and Intel Fellow of Intel Corporation's Health and Life Sciences Group. He is a familiar face to the PMI cohort program having played a critical role both as a member of the advisory committed to the NIH director's working group that crafted the design of the cohort program last summer and also as a member of the advisory panel for the PMI cohort program that was formed last November. Eric brings valuable experience as a patient, patient advocate, policy advocate, and thought leader to this new position. He will join NIH next month and we're already an active conversation with him about how NHGRI will collaborate with the PMI cohort program and I expect he will be presenting at this open session of council in the September at the September council meeting. At the same time, NIH has not been waiting for the permanent director to arrive before starting to stand up the PMI cohort program. Indeed, a significant number of things have been happening several of which were highlighted at a White House summit this past February marking the one-year anniversary of the initiative's announcement by President Obama. The major NIH activities completed to date include initiating a direct volunteers pilot study focused on approaches and systems for engaging, enrolling, and retaining participants which is being led by Vanderbilt University in collaboration with advisors from Verily, formerly Google Life Sciences. Also issuing communications award to Wondros and HCM strategists to develop messages and materials to implement strategies to effectively engage potential participants. Collaborating with the Health Resources and Services Administration or HRSA to begin partnerships for piloting PMI cohort activities in several federally qualified health centers or HQFCs and partnering with the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT or ONC and the Harvard Medical School Big Data to Knowledge Center on a Sync for Science pilot of open standardized applications that will allow individuals to contribute their electronic health records data to research projects and launching the Precision Medicine Initiatives Institutional Review Board or IRB chaired by Nancy Kass the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Now all of the adjust mentioned pilot activities are designed to provide valuable information for the full launch of the PMI cohort program later this year. Instrumental to that launch will be awarding of a number of additional and more traditional cooperative agreements including those supporting a coordinating center a network of healthcare provider organization or HPOs a participants technologies center and a biobank application for the latest set of funding opportunity announcements FOAs indicated by the blue boxes in this chart are currently under review with awards expected this summer. Additional components of the PMI cohort program are still under development as indicated by the green boxes. I can tell you that NHGRI staff remains actively involved in PMI cohort program activities. Terry Minolio leads a trans NIH group focused on protocols for collecting participant provided information. Laura Rodriguez and Christina Capizzi are on the NIH policy team and Carolyn Hutter is a key member of the overall program team for the PMI cohort program cooperative agreements. And that's the latest on the PMI but more to come. Moving on then to the NHGRI division of policy communications and education a number of updates. For starters, various NHGRI staff members have been working of late to increase the profile of an accessibility to information about genomic medicine on NHGRI's website genome.gov. Specifically, a team of NHGRI staff have reviewed the relevant information across genome.gov pages and reorganized and reorganized the content. Changes include the creation of a central landing page for general audiences, search engine optimization, and a new friendly URL aliases for key pages such as genome.gov backslash genomic medicine for the main landing page. The content of existing pages was also updated to increase relevance to the user and the overall navigation to key pages and resources has been improved. We plan to evaluate the impact of these changes by comparing web analytics data prior to and following these changes. They will also reach out to key stakeholders for feedback as well. The NHGRI history of genomics program within the communications and public liaison branch continues to conduct oral history interviews with key staff and members of the genomics community. So far the program has compiled 30 oral histories that will soon start appearing on NHGRI's Genome TV channel of YouTube. Last month the program started a new lecture series on the history of genomics and molecular biology, inviting historians of the human genome project, genomics and molecular biology to present their most recent scholarly work to utilize the institute's growing archives of historic materials and to meet with staff. The first speaker was Dr. Andrew Hogan and there are already plans for the next speaker, Dr. Alan Love. Since the beginning of this month scholars contributing to the special issue of the Journal of History of Biology have been working away preparing their planned papers. And finally lastly, seminars commemorating the 25th anniversary of the launch of the human genome project continue. The seminar series quarter century after the human genome projects launched lessons beyond the base pairs began in December of 2015. Lectures since last, since the February council meeting have included Drs. U. and Bernie, Bob Cooke-Degan and Mark Omara. The final seminar in the series will be given by Dr. David Bentley on May 26th. In light of a number of important recent genomic advances and developments, many issues about investigational device exemptions or IDEs issued by the U.S. FDA have surfaced. To help researchers and institutional review boards members understand the complex set of issues surrounding IDEs, we plan to host an educational workshop about IDEs and their implications for research involving genomic technologies. Since IDEs are relatively new for the genomics research community we hope that this workshop will fill a knowledge gap for investigators and institutions for which such regulations may apply. The workshop will feature a diverse group of speakers including NHGRI grantees, FDA staff, and IRB members with all speakers sharing their experience and knowledge about developing an IDE submission. If interested, you might want to save the date. The workshop will take place on Friday, June 10th in this very room. And to register for this event please send an email to the address shown here. Well, in pursuit of scalable models for improving genomic literacy among healthcare providers the Genomic Healthcare Branch in conjunction with the Education and Community Involvement Branch is again sponsoring a short course in genomics that targets healthcare providers and their educators. This year's course will occur in August, will focus on nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and the faculty who educate them in genomics. The three-day short course is held in the main NIH campus and offers participants the opportunity to learn best practices from leaders with particular expertise educating health professionals about genomics. In addition to lectures and panel discussions the course includes interactive sessions with course participants and presenters. One innovation for this year occurs on the third day and at that time the class will separate into two groups. The educator group will review existing healthcare curricula for ways to incorporate genomic content while the clinician group will learn about successful models in which genomics and genetics have been integrated into practice. Applications can be submitted online will be accepted through May 20th. Hopefully as all of you know April 25th was National DNA Day and as we do every year NHGRI hosted several major events to mark the occasion. This year education and community involvement branch and communication and public liaison branch partnered to expand the reach of our National DNA Day Programming. To kick off NHGRI's National DNA Day celebrations we started with a week long Ask Me Anything series hosted on the website Reddit. Prominent genomics experts participated answering genetics and genomics questions posed by the public. Dr. Francis Collins and myself were among those who participated. Then on National DNA Day itself NHGRI hosted a Twitter chat about education and careers in genomics and genetics that engage professionals and students. Following the Twitter chat NHGRI's first National DNA Day lecture was given by Dr. Eric Smona from the Duke University and focused on communicating science to students in the public in creative and relevant ways. To close out our events NHGRI partnered with the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History where NHGRI's own Dr. Bill Pavan gave a human origins today or hot topic talk about skin coloration variation. Lastly our new NHGRI or our new National DNA Day website at NHGRI featured a map where organizations hosting events across the country could post information about their event. More than 75 such events filled our map this year. And then in the 2016 USA science and engineering festival took place last month at the Washington D.C. Convention Center. The festival began with a sneak peek Friday event and continued throughout the weekend. Sneak peek Friday was a special event for school groups, homeschoolers, and military families. Participants were able to preview and experience the festival's exhibits before it officially opened to the public. As in the past the festival rented out the entire convention center and more than 3,000 exhibitors participated. NIH had a significant footprint at the festival and NHGRI was one of 19 institutes with a booth. Our activities which included extracting DNA from strawberries and demonstrating an interactive genetic trait tree required the collective efforts of roughly 40 NHGRI volunteers. More than 365,000 members of the public attended the event over three days and more than 2,000 people visited the NHGRI booth. A final important statistic more than 12 pounds of strawberries were sacrificed so that children could witness the wonder of DNA. The NHGRI Smithsonian Exhibition Genome Unlocking Life Code continues to travel across North America. The exhibition opens next week in Salt Lake City, Utah at the National History Museum of Utah and then in September the exhibit will travel to Wichita, Kansas. The first stop in 2017 will be the Peoria Riverfront Museum in Peoria, Illinois followed by the Health Museum in Houston, Texas. While the exhibition is in the city's NHGRI staff are partnering with the museums and science centers to help with education programs, docent training, and special community days. Please continue to check the exhibition's website unlockinglifecode.org again unlockinglifescode.org and follow it on social media for the most up-to-date program information. And finally, NHGRI has been meeting with a group of community health advocates and leaders who come together with the institute as the partnership for community outreach and engagement in genomics. This group recently developed and released a new infographic entitled Your Genome and You which depicts basic concepts about genetics and genomics for a public audience and aims to convey fundamental information about the importance of genomics in our everyday lives. The response to this infographic on NHGRI's website and social media sites was impressive and the first month that the resource was introduced more than 70,000 people were reached by NHGRI's Facebook posts announcing the infographic. The partnership for community outreach and engagement in genomics was established in 2014 and their dedication to promoting a public understanding of genomics has been steadfast. This infographic is a great addition of their previous and ongoing collaborative work. And finally, just a couple of things about our institute's intramural research program first in honor, Dr. Andi Baxavanis was elected a senior member of the International Society for Computational Biology. Dr. Baxavanis is head of the Computational Genomics Unit in the NHGRI Intramural Research Program and also serves as Assistant Director for Computational Biology for the broader NIH Intramural Research Community. This honor reflects his demonstrated and sustained contributions to the field of computational biology. And some highlights from NHGRI Intramural Research Program since the last council meeting, as usual, we pick three. Dr. Max Munka and colleagues announced the establishment of a free electronic atlas of human malformation syndromes in diverse populations in a paper published in Genomics and Medicine, in Genetics and Medicine. When complete, the atlas will be the first online photographic atlas for diagnosing people from different parts of the world with various genetic diseases. In a paper published in Clinical Chemistry, Dr. Les Beesecker and colleagues reported that the newer, faster next-generation DNA sequencing methods are as accurate and perhaps more accurate than traditional Sanger-based DNA sequencing methods. Sanger-based sequencing has been typically used to confirm findings generated by next-generation DNA sequencing. And finally, Dr. Elaine O. Strander and colleagues identified a specific genomic signature of some aggressive prostate tumors which may help pinpoint specific treatment options. Their findings were reported in a paper published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. And before ending my director's report, I would like to, as always, put in a plug and say that anyone wishing to receive my monthly email update called the Genomics Landscape can simply go to list.nih.gov and then search for NHGRI Landscape to sign up. And I should note that our total external subscription base is approaching the 1,000 mark. And as always, a big thanks to everybody who helped put this director's report together, 50 to 60 of you at least. We couldn't do this without a group effort and it happens all very quick in the last really just a few weeks. An additional thanks to the communications group and web team for getting all this stuff disseminated through the web and to archive it, which I know is a huge amount of work. And as always, special thanks to the real ring leader of director's report, Chris Wetterstrand. Chris is shown here at the Smithsonian Associate. The future is here festival where she experienced a Star Trek encounter with William Shatner. So go figure. And with that, I will close and thank you for your attention and happy to take any immediate questions. Yeah, Bob. Yeah. Eric, I was wondering if you would comment on the relationship between the precision medicine initiative and what's going on in the VA with the genomic medicine program. So I'm happy to take one. Is Carolyn around or I see Carolyn jumping up? There are lots of discussions around this and I bet you Carolyn is even more informed of the latest than I am. So there is, there is a, you're talking about with the million veterans program? Is that, yes. So they are in collaborative relationships and they've been working with the VA to not encompass all of the MVP into it, but to include portions of the MVP to re-consent individuals. The details of that are obviously still being negotiated, but they are very much working on making that collaboration. Did that answer your question? Yeah. I'm on the advisory committee for them and I think they've made really extraordinary progress in a number of interesting areas, biobanking, consent, volunteer recruitment. I'm wondering whether it'd be interesting to have them come and talk at the NHGRI council at some point. Yes, we'd be, and especially I know there's, it's a matter of do you want somebody on the federal side or someone who's highly involved, but not on the federal side because it would be, well, but, okay, right. Yes. No, I just think somebody's identifying the right person. That's what I was really getting at. Just talk about the progress and successes. Yep. I think that, and I think Carol is talking about, I mean, I think there's every motivation to try to make sure these things are highly synergistic. Anything else immediately? Okay. Awesome. We'll keep moving then. Thank you, Eric.