 Good morning everyone. On behalf of the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, it's my pleasure to welcome you to Maryland and welcome you to this workshop. As has already been said, my name is Adele Terzillo and I direct the Animal Systems Program at NIFA. We have a broad portfolio that covers animal health and animal production, funding extramural programs across the country in research, education, and extension. Having said that, we really value these interagency collaborations and partnerships that we have. This is one of a few and this one with NSF and NHGRI is probably the newest one and also a very exciting one and we value these collaborations for many reasons. One is simply because it brings groups of people like you together to talk, to exchange ideas, and to engage in intellectual discourse. It also helps us leverage funds. So we can put funding together with NSF, with NHGRI, with other institutes across NIH and other funding agencies to make more money available to you, the researchers, to do important research. We also value this effort because we truly value the idea of comparative genomics and comparative, not just genomics, but comparative physiology, comparative immunology, you name it. I'm trained as a physiologist and animal physiologist, but I've also taught human physiology and I have, I personally have a great appreciation for comparing across animal species. Our viewpoint, of course, at the USDA is to benefit animal agriculture, but as I'm sure many of you in the room appreciate, agricultural animals can make fantastic biomedical models depending on the question that you're answering. Oftentimes, the physiology is much more similar between an agricultural animal and a human than is a mouse model and a human. So I hope that you share my appreciation for that and that really is largely why we are here and an active member of this collaboration. So with that, I will turn it over to our next partner and that's Donal from NSF.