 Ladies and gentlemen, friends and colleagues, we're getting ready to kick off the second obesity summit. But I should go back to my main slide. We're happy to have about 125 people registered for this. Not quite everybody's here, but thanks for the good turnout this morning. My name's Christopher Gardner. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Medicine. And with great honor, I work with many colleagues at the Stanford Prevention Research Center. We have a very interesting program for you today. And I was hoping to put it in a little bit of perspective for you. First of all, I'll start out with a couple of thanks. We were generously sponsored to do this by the Neutralite Health Institute. And for those of you who got dozens of emails from Antonella Dool, I'd like a round of applause for Antonella for countless hours and emails and linens and menus and things like that. So why an obesity summit? Why now? Why number two? Well, you have to go back a ways to put this in perspective. And in 2009, we had obesity summit one. We didn't call it number one, because we didn't know there would be a number two. And it all came about because of an RFA from NIH to become a Nutrition Obesity Research Center. It's a P30 application. The purpose of these P30s, interestingly, is not to do any new research. It's to support funded research that's already going on. And to qualify for one of these, you have to demonstrate that you have a critical mass of obesity or nutrition-related research on campus. And that you're going to further support these and bring added value to all these projects, which means you have to find everyone on campus that you can that's doing obesity research and come up with some cores. So this isn't new research. It's just cores. So these cores provide services and consulting and support your ongoing research and collaboratively bring people together for seminars and workshops, have pilot projects. So it's a great thing to have on campus. In fact, Harry Greenberg has had one for years for digestive diseases. And a nice part of it is you have to set aside money to do pilot feasibility projects. And in fact, we will have an RFA going out for that, because we're going to do that again. Anyway, this is how this all got started two years ago. There was this possibility. There's about 12 existing Norcs in the country. And they were going to fund one more. And we decided to pool everybody together to see if we would qualify for that one more. And it's really not actually all that much money by the time you take the $750,000 and give $100,000 to the pilot projects and then split the rest among the cores. Basically, you get part of a director, part of an associate director, part of a lab tech, and subsidize a few assays. Still, it's a great resource. And these were the existing Norcs at the time. I'm going to quickly flip over and show you that this is where they were positioned in the country. Can you see that huge gap on the West Coast? I mean, I thought we should have qualified by geography alone. Somebody needs to represent the West Coast other than Seattle there. So after much debate and a lot of consternation, it was hard to figure out what cores would best serve the Stanford campus. And this is the set of cores we came up with. These are all the directors, the associate directors. There were some notable exceptions left out. This was kind of a rush. A lot of us had no idea what this entailed. In the end, it was a 508-page paper application. You can't do these online. These are all paper. There were 77 NORC-eligible investigators who would be using these resources. And when all was said and done, we got a score of 37. It was excellent, and it was not funded. Which made me think, personally, that this whole thing was a huge demand on time. And is it worth it to do again? I don't know. The group that got this was Michigan. I started to think of the NORC like the Death Star from Star Wars, because it had sucked up so much of so many people's times and didn't result in anything other than generating this fabulous list of potential colleagues who worked in many different fields that were interested in obesity-related research. So I had a grateful donor who was interested in funding something to keep this alive. And they kept delaying and delaying the funding. And we finally got it. This is about a year and a half after we submitted the NORC. So I was afraid that we would lose a lot of these folks. But we had this great email list. We sent it out. And we said, hey, we're going to have another obesity summit. We're not funded to do the NORC. But wouldn't it be great to try to keep everyone connected? And that's really how this started out. And what the funder really wanted out of this is a journal supplement. So all the speakers today have been asked to generate a short paper on their insights into the heterogeneity of obesity and their implications for prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. So that was our first objective, pull all these people back, reconnect them, see NORC or no NORC if we could bring something to life on this campus. Well, it just so happened that as we got this initiated, my colleague Randy Stafford said, oh my gosh, Christopher, check out the RFA's. They're going to do it again. NIDDK is going to offer another new NORC. And we are already midstream recruiting speakers for this thing. So we decided, really, are we going to do this again? After all the lifeblood, it sucked out of us to do this the first time. Yes, it was an opportunity not to be missed. We had great comments from the first one. We have a great PI for it. Tom Robinson, who's going to speak twice today. Many of the NORC investigators are speaking today. So we decided to go for it again. And Randy Stafford promised to be the Luke Skywalker this time and to step in in a bigger way and help us fight off the Death Star and put together NORC II, which means when we're done with a conference, afterward we're going to have a discussion. Not only are we going to introduce you to some fabulous research going on on this campus, but we'll also have a group staying around afterward to talk about who are the best leaders of these cores, who has funded research that we didn't tap into last time, who would use these services, what are the most useful services to offer. So we're going to try to make a more competitive application this time. We have to look specifically for NIDDK funding and then for NIH and then federal, even non-federal applies, but not as much. We have to have another pilot feasibility program for this. You actually have to put out on campus a request for proposals ahead of time and rank them and select them and submit them with the application, even though you haven't even been funded to do it yet. So this RFA will be going out hopefully within the next month and then we'll rank them and pick some winners again. But for today, it is my great honor to have assembled this cast of brilliant, bright Stanford researchers working in a number of different areas. I can tell you that there are a lot of researchers we missed. We've got two keynotes, Gary Nolan and Jerry Reven. They're allowed 30 minutes. Everyone else is held to 10 minutes. This is any one of them could easily engage you for an hour. But for the purpose of today, we are highlighting their research. We're not giving them the chance to show the whole thing. We're going to have three panels. We've got a basic science perspective, a prevention perspective, a clinical perspective. We've got a coffee break in there. We've got a fabulous lunch. And when all is said and done at 2.15, we expect a smaller subset of people to stick around and talk about what some of these NORC cores would be to make us as competitive as possible. The preceding program is copyrighted by the board of trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Please visit us at med.stanford.edu.