 I think there's intentionality behind the sweaters. Yes, I'm a very large person, you know, I'm a big physical person, and if I put a suit and tie on, it's more intimidating. And so I like the channel Mr. Rogers, who was probably the most accessible person that I could imagine. I'm proud to be a boilermaker for many, many reasons. Big one is just being part of this mission of what Purdue is for the state and for the students. It's a place that there's very little barriers. You can get anything done that you want to get done. If you can dream it, you can do it here. My childhood had a number of different seasons in it. I grew up in a rural place in northern Michigan in a family that was working to make the best of it. It was tough. We were just trying to get by day by day. And I had always been doing just fine in school, but didn't really know what the next steps were, how to take those next steps. In my community where I was growing up, this woman as pediatrician became good friends of my mom, and I remember very distinctly wanting to apply to the University of Michigan. And she really strongly encouraged me to do so, to apply to college, to try for the harder places. And she guided me through that process, helped me with the application, helped me get in. Once I was in, I realized just how underprepared I really was. And I just really had a lot of pull to think about stopping and going back home. But not only did it make help me get in, she gave me her number so I could call her if I had a crisis. And she picked up every time, right away. And just said, just don't matter what, just stay with it. It's okay if you don't get a perfect A, if you fail at this, but just stay with it, keep at it. Mentorship is not just teaching, it's being there after the teaching is done. I want to be known as one who focused first on serving the people of the school. I try to be as accessible as I can to make the faculty extremely successful, to have the students have amazing opportunities and to strategically use those in a way that can really help the people of Indiana and those that are in our community around us. He has this ability to relate to everyone in such a unique way, playful, and joyous manner, but also being able to get his experiences across, to get new ideas implemented. It was tough. I remember being four years in as an assistant professor and not had really much success in getting grant funding going and kind of having the same kinds of questions and lingering doubts until finally starting to keep going at it and making some sense of the process. Being strategic about how to write the grants and developing a color-coded matrix, because I'm a very visual type of learner, to share with my colleagues, to say, you write this sentence for this particular reason, you have to write this sentence for this exact particular reason, and all these things map directly to how this is reviewed. And that has helped a lot of faculty, it helped me get out of the rut and helped a lot of others to be successful as well. You can really tell how much he cares about the school and about the people in it. He doesn't come across as somebody who is overthinking his words, he tells you exactly what he thinks. I think of David as a jokester, someone who is very charismatic, someone who naturally has this ability to teach and motivate. That's what makes David great. Love this opportunity to make, was that person for me. There are many, many times now, when I am that person for a faculty member or a student, when I need a little push to stay with it, to persist and pursue what they're trying to accomplish. Many people in the department are mentors and feel like mentors, whether they're official or not, there's such a great informal mentoring network here. That ability to reach out and know that somebody's got your back is really special. It's been a great place to think about how to do science in a big way, how to grow. My next step is to leverage this opportunity as head of the school to make it known for how great of a place it really is. We have the best faculty, the best students, the best staff and we have great partners across the state to really address problems of human health relevance that are important for the state. And I want to be somebody who really helps make that grow, makes that really turn into something. You know, I love the metaphor of a Boilermaker, a tradesperson who's part of a bigger team working on something that's so big you can't do it by yourself. So I always think about Boilermakers and what it's like to be a Boilermaker is being part of this team that's just trying to go out and do bigger things but doing it together.