 And with that, I'm ready to turn it over to Eric for the director's report. Great. Thank you, Rudy. Well, the open session of this meeting of the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research is being webcast live. And as a reminder, especially for those who are new to council, that the open session of all NHGRI council meetings are videotaped and they're made available as a permanent archive on the Internet, including the presentations themselves and also various associated documents. And in particular, for some of our ad hoc council members, I want to make you aware that there's an electronic resource associated with my director's report. This is analogous to a supplemental materials section of a published paper and it could be accessed on the URL that's shown here. And the slides that I show during the director's report are also available electronically at this site, both as a PDF file and also as a PowerPoint file. And for slides, many of the slides, in fact, are associated with specific documents or relevant websites, and in each of those cases, there's a document number on the bottom right of the slide, which references materials that can be accessed or downloaded at the websites shown here. And in addition to the video archive, this webpage and all the linked documents will be permanently archived on NHGRI's website, genome.gov, as a historic reference. Now, there's several presentations that will follow mine during the open session of this council meeting, and I've tailored my director's report around those presentations and will not discuss in detail topics that others will cover in greater detail. So to begin with, later this morning, you'll hear from Dr. Phil Bourne, who's the new NIH Associate Director for Data Science. After lunch, Dr. Adam Falzelfeld will give a report on the recent NHGRI workshop, Future Opportunities for Genome Sequencing and Beyond, and this will be followed by a presentation about the initial set of concept clearances relating to the proposed renewal of the NHGRI genome sequencing program, which will be given by both Dr. Adam Falzelfeld and also Dr. Lou Wang. Another concept clearance will then be presented by Dr. Larry Brody for the contract renewal of the Center for Inherited Disease Research. Dr. Brody will then go on to give a presentation describing the NHGRI Division of Genomics and Society and the LC Research Program, and this will be followed by an update from this council's Genomics and Society working group, given by former council member Dr. Pamela Sankar. And lastly, Dr. Elise Feingold will give an update on the encyclopedia of DNA elements or ENCODE project. So for the rest of my director's report, I will follow along and talk about these seven areas, and we will start with general NHGRI updates. Well, for the second time in 2014, a founding member and key leader of NHGRI has retired. We say goodbye. We've said goodbye earlier to Dr. Jane Peterson, and now we say farewell and enjoy retirement to Dr. Mark Eyre after 26 years at NHGRI. Now for the bulk of that time, Mark was a key leader of the Extramural Research Program. Most recently, he was the NHGRI deputy director. Mark had a critical role in the Human Genome Project. He saw the project through its many phases, its debates, its competitions, its races, and its completions. He played an important role in developing the Bermuda Principles for data release, which then laid the foundation for more widespread data sharing. For many years, he was a trusted advisor to me and other NHGRI leadership. He was centrally involved in crafting five-year strategic plans for the Human Genome Project between 1990 and 2003, and then along with me, the 2003 and 2011 NHGRI visions for the future of genomics research. He had a major hand in establishing and managing prominent programs such as the Cancer Genome Atlas, N-Code, and Mod-N-Code, the Human Heredity in Health in Africa, H3Africa Initiative, the Big Data to Knowledge BD2K Program, and others. His leadership, wisdom, and dedication to the true foundations on which NHGRI has been built. And while Mark retired from federal service at the end of June, he continues to be a consultant on some key NIH and NHGRI programs, including H3Africa and BD2K. So fortunately, we're not completely losing Mark's involvement, but nonetheless, we are immensely grateful to him for his many years of contributions to NHGRI and to the field of genomics more broadly. The exhibition, Genome Unlocking Life's Code, has ended its tenure at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The exhibition opened at this museum in June of 2013 and closed on September 1st, just really last week. In this time, over 3.3 million people visited the exhibition. In conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution, NHGRI hosted 15 outreach programs to enrich the learning experience provided through the exhibition's content. The website, the videos, and other media associated with the exhibition have been nationally recognized, receiving several awards this past summer, and the website, UnlockingLife'sCode.org, will continue to serve as the focal point for the information about the exhibition and an educational resource for students and teachers and the general public as the exhibition travels. It will also continue to feature news and events associated with the exhibition. Now, to celebrate the exhibition's incredibly successful run at the Smithsonian, we will be holding a closing symposium at the National Museum of Natural History on September 30th. Then, for the next four to five years, the exhibition will be traveling around North America, with its first stop being the Rubin H. Fleet Center in San Diego, where it will open on September 27th and be resident until January, and from there, it travels to San Jose for a stint from late July until late April of next year. In July, it was really our pleasure to host Dr. James Watson, Nobel Laureate and former NHGRI director, when he came to Washington, D.C. to tour the Genome UnlockingLife'sCode exhibition. Dr. Watson's work in discovering DNA's double helical structure is prominently featured in the exhibition, and multiple NHGRI and Smithsonian-affiliated staff members were excited to show Dr. Watson around the museum and around the exhibition in particular, as you can see from some of these photos. Now, as many of you recall, NHGRI's division of policy communications and education has for many years partnered with the American Society of Human Genetics in sponsoring a 16-month Genetics and Public Policy Fellowship. This program was developed in 2002 by the Policy and Program Analysis Branch, and provides each fellow with an opportunity to gain valuable policy experience at the Institute, at ASHG, and then in the U.S. Congress. Well, last week, we welcomed our latest fellow, Kate Blazinski. Kate comes to us, having recently earned her Ph.D. at Northwestern University, and will be working at NHGRI for the next four months before moving to a congressional office. Now, meanwhile, beginning this year, NHGRI is extending its partnership with ASHG to sponsor a new Genetics and Education Fellowship. This 16-month program will allow the fellow to work at ASHG and at NHGRI in our Education and Community Involvement Branch, where they'll conduct educational research and develop educational programs for a wide range of audiences. The fellow will also have the option to do a rotation with a public or a private organization involved in genetics education. And I'm pleased to announce that Elizabeth Tuck will be the first ASHG and NHGRI Genetics and Education Fellow. Elizabeth is an upper school science teacher at the Wellington School in Columbus, Ohio, and she also began her tenure with us last week. In 2012, NHGRI began an institute-wide initiative to capture and preserve the details of its historic role in the Human Genome Project and in subsequent genomics programs. Since then, we've developed and implemented an internal effort to archive, catalog, and summarize the institute's documents related to major NHGRI genomics programs and other institute endeavors, creating the substrate for a very valuable scientific historic resource. To date, we've digitized and or described over 400,000 NHGRI documents dating back to the beginning of the institute. In addition, we're in the process of creating a searchable archival database to enable public access to select files. To augment these efforts, we also have launched an oral history program to capture on video the perspectives and experiences of those involved in major NHGRI programs and projects, and to date, we've conducted 14 such interviews. Over time, scholarly descriptions and analyses of some of the major NHGRI programs and other institute endeavors will be undertaken, and we expect the first such analysis to delve into NHGRI's involvement in genomic variation programs. So moving on then to general NIH updates. At the May Council meeting, I informed you that President Obama had nominated Sylvia Matthews Burwell to be the 22nd Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, replacing Secretary Sebelius, who planned to resign from the position. Such presidential nominations are subject to confirmation by the U.S. Senate, and I'm pleased to report that on June 5th, Sylvia Burwell was indeed confirmed by the Senate by a strong bipartisan vote of 78 to 17. Secretary Burwell began her official duties as DHHS Secretary on June 9th, and has very quickly become engaged in issues important to NIH. She is already familiar with NIH, having visited the campus last month in her previous role as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. At the institute level, a great friend of NHGRI's Dr. Story Landis recently announced that she will be retiring as Director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, NINDS, a position she has held since 2003. Story came to NIH in 1995 to be the NINDS scientific director and was promoted eight years later to become the NINDS director. I can tell you, I have worked closely with Story for many years, first when we were both scientific directors, and later when we were both institute directors. And she has truly been a terrific scientific leader and a wonderful colleague and mentor, and I will tell you, I will personally miss her at the NIH. Meanwhile, Dr. Walter Korschetz will serve as Acting Director of NINDS while a national search for the new director is conducted. Other leadership changes are as follows. Recognizing the increasingly high priority issues surrounding biosecurity and biosafety, and the need for greater amount of NIH senior leadership dealing with these issues, Dr. Francis Collins recently created a new position to serve as the lead and primary point of coordination across NIH on matters related to biosecurity and biosafety. Based on her strong track record of leadership, experience, and accomplishment in these areas, Francis appointed Dr. Amy Patterson to be the first NIH Associate Director for Biosecurity and Biosafety Policy. Amy was previously the NIH Associate Director for Science Policy. Amy's skilled analytical capacity and vision has been a hallmark of her career, and I'm personally grateful to her commitment and skill as over the past few years we've worked closely together in crafting the new genomic data sharing policy. Meanwhile, Dr. David Shurtliffe, who's Deputy Director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, will assume the role of acting NIH Associate Director for Science Policy while the search for a new Associate Director is conducted. Also over the summer, NIH saw the departure of another Associate Director, Pat White, who had served as the NIH Associate Director for Legislative Policy and Analysis since 2010. During his tenure, Pat was a leading figure in the NIH Office of Director, heading up NIH's main office for interacting with Congress. He was terrific in this role, and he is already being greatly missed. But that said, Pat left the NIH to become president of a brand new advocacy group to support the agency called Act for NIH. The focus of this new group is to achieve budgetary increases for NIH, so we're happy that he'll still be working to support NIH research, and in a capacity that will continue to mean he'll be interacting with many of us. As you might imagine, with the two high-profile and important NIH Associate Director positions now vacant, the one for science policy and the one for legislative analysis and policy, Francis is very eager to fill these two important leadership positions. So in fact, I have been asked to co-chair the search committee charge with identifying and evaluating candidates for both of these vacancies. Advertisements for these positions are already out, and applications are being accepted through September 26th, so please spread the word to colleagues who might wish to be considered for either NIH Associate Director position, and I'd be happy to talk to anyone interested in applying. Well, NIH recently announced changes that will be made next year to the content and format of the biosketch section of NIH grant applications. I thought it was important to review these, and I'm sure all of you will be quite interested in this. The overall length of the biosketch will be extended from four to five pages and will be comprised of four sections. There are no significant changes to sections A and B, the personal statement and the positions and honors, but section C is different, called contributions to science, and it's new and it replaces a simple list of selected publications. Rather than listing selected publications, the PI will be asked to briefly describe up to five significant contributions that he or she has made to science. This can include the central findings of the research, the influence of that research on progress in the field, and or the PI's specific role in the described research. For each contribution, up to four peer-reviewed papers can be provided, and a link to the PI's full set of publications can be included. Meanwhile, section D, a description of research report remains unchanged. This revised biosketch format was initially piloted for two RFAs issued in the summer of 2013. The second round of piloting is being performed this summer, and it's just wrapping up, and it'll be evaluated by interviews with applicants and reviewers. And the results of this evaluation will be used to fine-tune the instructions to applicants and the guidance to reviewers. But the full rollout of this new biosketch format will then occur with applications submitted after January 16th, 2015. And you should look for an NIH guide notice to be published sometime this fall with additional details to the change in the NIH biosketch. Well, after multiple years of effort and significant work by many NIH staff members, the final NIH genomic data sharing policy was published in the Federal Register on August 26th. The effective date for this policy is January 25th in 2015. And the policy expands upon and replaces the 2007 NIH GWAS policy. Now, as we've discussed previously with this council, a draft of the policy was published in September of 2013 for public comment. In a total of 107 public comments were received and they were considered in the development of the final policy. Of this new genomic data sharing policy is based on the principle of the optimal way to realize the full value of genomic data is through broad data sharing. The policy will apply to NIH-supported and NIH-conducted research generating large human and non-human genomic data sets produced by array-based methods or high-throughput DNA sequencing methods. I can tell you that NHGRI staff were heavily involved in the development of this policy and they remain actively involved in its implementation. As an example, I serve as the chair of the internal NIH oversight committee for this policy as it goes forward. At the May council meeting, I described a new initiative by the Energy and Commerce Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives called A Path to 21st Century Cures. Under the bipartisan leadership of Congressman Fred Upton and Congresswoman Diana DeGette, the committee has held multiple round tables and hearings to solicit suggestions from a variety of stakeholders about the role that Congress could play in accelerating the pace of scientific discovery and its translation to treatments and cures. The topics have ranged from clinical trials and digital healthcare to evidence development and personalized medicine. Now over the summer and into this fall, the committee has taken their show on the road, so to speak, holding a number of roundtables around the country. For example, as part of this, I participated in a roundtable hosted last week in Denver in Congresswoman DeGette's district. The focus of this event was personalized medicine. Also participating were Janet Woodcock from the FDA and several researchers from the University of Colorado in the greater Denver area. I'll tell you it was a great discussion and provided a good chance to talk about genomics with the Congresswoman. The plan is for Congressman Upton and Congresswoman DeGette to use the information gathered from these various roundtables and hearings and to introduce a new bill in the House early next year. Of course, all this relates to funding and fiscal year 2015 will start on October 1. And once again, we find ourselves quite uncertain about NIH's or NHGRI's budget. The regular appropriations process has once again not been completed by the US Congress. And here is a summary of what has happened so far. So in the Senate, the relevant appropriation subcommittee responsible for NIH funded funding drafted a bill allocating $30.5 billion for NIH and $504 million for NHGRI. But that bill has not been approved by the full committee. Now both of those numbers are just a small amount higher than the proposed President's budget. Meanwhile, the equivalent committee in the House has not issued a bill at all. So what that means is that we're once again relying on Congress to pass a continuing resolution or a CR to keep the government operational beyond September 30th at the end of this month. Such a CR is expected and will likely fund the government at least through the November elections. But it is really unclear what the budgetary forecast looks like beyond that point, especially with this being an election year. So those are the NIH updates. Let me now move on to general genomics updates starting with some awards and honors. Dr. Richard Gibbs, an NHGRI grantee and a former council member has been awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia. This award recognizes eminent achievement and merit of the highest degree in service to Australia or humanity at large. Congratulations to Richard. The Hudson Alpha Institute of Biotechnology has awarded Jay Shinduri, an NHGRI grantee and incoming council member. This is part of what we always try to embarrass folks when they first come on as Ad Hoxson. But he was awarded its Hudson Alpha Life Sciences Prize for his work in the development and application of genomic technologies, including completing a genome sequence of the HeLa cell line. Congratulations Jay. Featured as an NHGRI genome advance the month and since the last council have been publications describing why chromosome evolution, ancient methylation patterns in Neanderthal and Denosovan genomes, detecting heart transplant rejection using DNA sequencing and disease-causing mutations in mitochondrial genomes. Moving beyond NHGRI, recent prominent genomics news stories included a Washington Post article about personalized medicine, an article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette that featured a conversation with NHGRI's Les Besiker about one's genome not being one's destiny, and a New York Times article about the recent publications from the Mod-Incode project. And then, as always, in terms of genomes in the news, there have been a number of newly generated genome sequences reported since the last council meeting. It includes the Tyroelian icemen, the stick insect, 240 strains of Brewer's yeast, the termite, the hooded crow, the passenger pigeon, the whipworm, the common bean, eucalyptus, Atlantic salmon, sheep, 10 varieties of citrus, including sweet orange, sour orange, amandrons and the pomalos, the polar bears, electric eels, 1,000 bull genomes, project phase one, which included 234 individuals from three species, the Antarctic midge, the canola plant, and one I really want to talk about, elephant genes, in particular, a publication describing their novel repertoire of olfactory receptor genes. Now, I really like this last paper in particular because genome research released a press release about the paper that included this photograph of three elephants that I took while on vacation last year in Kenya, and that story and photograph were picked up and featured by a number of prominent news venues. I'm convincing me further that if I ever get sick of this job, I'm telling you I'm gonna quit and I'm gonna become a professional photographer. So, okay, moving on to the NHRI extramural program. Well, the major development, we're gonna discuss more in the open session, related to our extramural research programs flagship, our genome sequencing program, and of course, this was a strategic meeting that took place in July. And the URL for the workshop's website is provided under document 16, through which you can access the workshop agenda and also the video recordings of all the plenary presentations. Later in this session, you will be getting a formal and more detailed update about the workshop from Dr. Adam Felsenfeld. In my opinion, the workshop was successful in providing NHRI advice about the scientific questions and opportunities that can be addressed by large-scale genomic studies. In addition to the excellent series of presenters, there were breakout sessions to stimulate discussion, much of which then spilled out into the hallways during the breaks. It was a very rigorous and sometimes vigorous meeting with all discussions being very collegial, even this exchange, which I actually showed at the end of the workshop between these two genomics gladiators. Since the workshop, I will tell you, there remains a huge dispute internal at the Institute among the staff about the exact topic of this intense conversation, but one could only imagine what they were saying to one another. Okay. Cancer Genome Atlas, by means of an update as a reminder, a coordinated effort to better understand the molecular basis of cancer. Final sample shipments for over 10,000 cases were sent to genome sequencing and characterization centers in June. For each of the over 30 cancer types, the TCGA network has published a comprehensive integrated analysis of sequence and mutation analysis, copy number variation, gene and micro RNA expression and promoter methylation. TCGA papers focusing on lung adenocarcinoma and stomach adenocarcinoma were published in nature in July. A kidney chromophobe paper was published in cancer cell in August and is known worthy as being the first publication from the TCGA rare tumor effort. Other rare tumors being studied by TCGA include thymoma, uveal melanoma, and sarcomas. And last fall, TCGA published a set of pan cancer manuscripts in nature and building on that work, a paper reporting and integrated subtypes analysis of 12 cancer types was published in cell last month. Another component of our genome sequencing program, of course, is our Centers for Mendelian Genomics established just under three years ago with the aim of helping to establish the genomic bases for most of the remaining unsolved Mendelian disorders. To date, these groups have collaborated with 568 investigators from 255 institutions in 36 countries. In doing so, they've collected 1,790 samples from 6,421 families representing over 1,400 Mendelian disorders. And to date, whole exome sequences have been generated for 11,800 samples with analyses ongoing. Novel discoveries about the genomic basis or the clinical phenotypes of over 280 Mendelian disorders have so far been made, and nearly 100 manuscripts have been published or impressed reporting some of these discoveries in addition to develop methods and resources. Now, as described in these publications, the phenotype and genotype-driven approaches are both effective for disease gene discovery. Novel disease genes and pathways as well as a disease biology underline a variety of rare diseases have been revealed. And finally, it is worth noting that along with discoveries made by others, the center's studies have revealed pleotropy and genetic heterogeneity among Mendelian conditions to a greater extent than had previously been thought. The centers continue to reach out to the broader community of researchers and clinicians in an effort to enable and accelerate Mendelian disease discovery. For example, the recently launched Gene Matcher program is a freely accessible website designed to enable connections between clinicians and researchers from around the world who share an interest in the same gene or genes. The principal goal for making Gene Matcher available is to help solve unsolved Mendelian diseases. And the site allows investigators to post genes of interest and it then connects investigators who post interest in the same gene. And as of August 1st, 662 genes have been submitted to Gene Matcher by 143 submitters and 15 matches have already been made. The center at the University of Washington held a well-received Mendelian data analysis workshop in 2013. And building on the success of its first workshop, they had a second workshop last month. 17 participants, including collaborators and various investigators attended the workshop and they appreciated the direct interaction with the center analysts, the IT teams and the PIs. The workshop included concept-driven lectures on approaches to Mendelian gene discovery, for example, how to design projects and also hands-on exercises involving data analysis using open source software and the testing of different genetic models for disease. Based on the survey conducted after the workshop, the feedback was very positive, including the desire for additional more advanced workshops in the future. The other component worth mentioning of our genome sequencing program is our genome sequencing informatics tools or GSIT program, known by the name ISEEC tools, which comprises six projects that are designed to democratize access to genome analysis and provide researcher-friendly sequence analysis tools. Now, in contrast to most academic software, ISEEC tools are designed to be reliable and easy to use with robust software engineering, good user support, and innovative data science. ISEEC tools can be used to analyze many complex genomic variants beyond simple single nucleotide variants, and this is proving useful in clinical research. Recent advances include the annotation of copy number variants with the ability to discriminate between benign and pathogenic copy number variants using the SG Advisor web server, the characterization of complex indels using Pindel GKNO and GATK, and powerful prediction of structural variants using genome strip. GSIT will present a workshop on ISEEC tools at the 2014 ASHG annual meeting. The workshop will demonstrate the use of cloud-enabled ISEEC tools for genome analysis and the process to help demystify the cloud for genomics researchers. The workshop itself actually is now sold out, but an additional hands-on evening session has been added to accommodate additional participants. Moving on then, the Advanced DNA Sequencing Technology program has made eight new awards that encompass a wide range of creative approaches to solving particular sequencing technology challenges. Two projects, one of which will be implemented on single-cell DNA using microfluidics, will develop methods to generate information that links together sequence obtained by short-read methods to generate long-range information. Another seeks to increase base calling accuracy using the calling of epigenetic modifications obtained when reading DNA sequence using a protein nanopore. Staying on the nanopore theme, two projects will explore ways to make long-functional arrays of nanopores to increase the throughput of nanopore sequencing. While another seeks to demonstrate how a graphene nanopore can distinguish among the four DNA nucleotides even with very fast reads. A seventh project will build on a carbon nanotube-based sensor to electronically detect the motion of DNA polymerase molecules, adding nucleotides to a DNA chain. And an eighth project proposes single-molecule sequencing with downstream enzymatic signal amplification. Now, these are the last awards that will be made under this program. We're now entering a planning process to determine the next steps for NHGRI in this technology development space. Moving on to ENCODE, the goal of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements or ENCODE is to create a catalog of all functional elements in the human and mouse genomes and to make those catalogs freely available as a resource to the biomedical research community. The goal of the modern code project was to provide similar catalogs for the model organism, C. elegane, Drosophila melanogaster. The recently updated ENCODE data release policy allows the scientific community to publish results based on any ENCODE data without restrictions as soon as the data are released. Meanwhile, ENCODE publications include over 361 papers by the ENCODE consortium participants and over 148 papers by modENCODE consortium participants. There are at least 658 community publications from groups without ENCODE funding that have used ENCODE data and at least 149 community publications from groups without modENCODE funding that have used modENCODE data. Of note, modENCODE published three integrative papers in nature in August comparing flyworm and human data and a number of modENCODE companion papers have been or will be published in nature, genome research and genome biology this year. Now, funding for modENCODE ended in 2012, but we expect the community will continue to publish papers using modENCODE data for years to come. And finally, at least fine goal will give a more detailed update on the ENCODE project later in the open session. But in June, the trio of NHGRI extramural program directors who lead the ENCODE project receive the Department of Health and Human Services, DHHS Secretaries Award for Distinguished Service. As shown here, former DHHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius presented the award to Doctors Elise Feingold, Peter Goode and Mike Payson for their outstanding leadership of this important genomics initiative. So congratulations to those three program directors. Turning our attention to the Centers of Excellence in Genomic Science, or our SEGs program, there were two recent SEG papers that attracted some very laudatory comments that staff wanted to share with you. So a paper published in science from George Church's SEGs at Harvard Medical School was entitled Highly Multiplex Subcellular RNA Sequencing in situ. In a natured biotechnology news and views by Paul Gennard and Arjun Raj have the following comments about this paper. No one to our knowledge has attempted anything approaching the complexity of sequencing inside the cell itself. This work represents a technical tour de force that required the solution of several chemical and computational challenges. And then FISSEEC has the potential to transform several areas of research. Also a nature methods research highlight by Tal Naoui commented the potential for in situ sequencing is enormous. A second paper published in nature biotechnology from Andy Feinberg's SEGs at Johns Hopkins was entitled Epigenome Wide Association Data implicates DNA methylation as an intermediary of genetic risk for rheumatoid arthritis. A feature story written by Gina Calada in the New York Times quoted two scientists well known to us. Brad Bernstein said this is one of the first studies that looks for an epigenetic disease association in a really rigorous fashion. And Kun Zhang said I'm quite impressed with their level of rigor and sophistication. Moving on to emerge, the goal of the Emerge Network is to explore and disseminate the best approaches to incorporate genomic variant data into electronic medical records for use in clinical research and clinical care. In July, NHGRI released three RFA's for Emerge Phase Three to expand and enhance the Emerge Network's activities in genomic discovery and clinical implementation research. The first RFA is open to applications that will leverage data from large biorepositories to build upon the genome sequencing, phenotyping and implementation methods and knowledge generated in Emerge Two. The second calls for a coordinating center and that will provide a centralized support and infrastructure for the program, facilitating communications between sites and leading cross-study analyses. The third RFA relates to something new to the network in Phase Three, centralized sequencing and genotyping facilities that will provide high quality, clear validated sequencing and genotyping data for returning clinically relevant results to Emerge participants for clinical care. The submission deadline for all three RFA's is November 12th. Now, in the December 2013, there was a, Emerge investigators were invited to submit papers to a special issue of the journal Frontiers and Genetics around a theme of genetics research and electronic health records linked to DNA, biobanks. Now, 15 papers have been published in the journal's e-collection and a total of 18 papers will be released in the special issue later this year. These papers draw on the vast array of Emerge in using EHRs to uncover novel genetic associations and exploring ELSI aspects of such work. For example, in this paper, investigators describe their EHR-based FIWAS techniques used to explore a pleotropy of genomic variants in the FTO gene in a population of 10,000 subjects. Another paper shown here summarizes the challenges faced and knowledge gained from returning genomics results in EHR for use by physicians at point of care and assesses the impact of incidental findings generated by targeted resequencing in 84 pharmacogenes. In addition, Emerge was selected to participate in the 2014 International Genetic Epidemiology Society or IJIS meeting in August, which every year gathers prominent experts in multi-discipline areas to share their research on the genetic basis of disease, complex traits and disease risk factors. Emerge investigator, Shafali Verma, presented on Emerge's unique FIWAS techniques and its utility in conducting genomic research. The purpose of the clinical genome resource, known as ClinGen, is to create a centralized repository and interconnected resource of clinically relevant variants for both clinical and research communities. Now, ClinGen investigators are now working closely with NCBI and clinical laboratories to standardize the clinical assessment of genomic variants and the process of then submitting them to the ClinVar database. As of August of 2014, more than 25 groups have submitted pathogenicity assertions on over 80,000 variants within over 23,000 genes. ClinGen's curation working group is developing consensus processes for identifying clinically relevant variants. Meanwhile, the gene curation working group has developed a procedure for classifying the clinical validity of gene disease pairs and the actionability working group is drafted a semi-quantitative scale to assess clinical actionability in pre-symptomatic individuals. The latter two groups are testing performance of their procedures with a variety of gene phenotype pairs. ClinGen investigators are presenting posters, giving invited talks and hosting a booth at the upcoming National Society of Genetic Counselors Education Conference and the 2014 ASHG annual meeting. Moving on to Phoenix. The consensus measures of phenotypes and exposures known as Phoenix has produced an online resource of standard measures related to common diseases, phenotypic traits and environmental exposures. Use of Phoenix measures facilitates combining data from a variety of studies and makes it easy for investigators to expand a study design beyond the primary research focus. Now, thus far, over 1,500 investigators from 155 countries are registered users of the Phoenix toolkit and 90 NIH funding opportunity announcements or FOAs have encouraged the use of Phoenix measures in grant applications. Rare conditions and obesity are the newest domains that will be tackled by Phoenix in the next year. And through collaborations with the National Institute of Mental Health and the Tobacco Regulatory Science Program within the NIH Office of Disease Prevention, Phoenix is adding additional measures in the areas of post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide, and tobacco use and smoking-related behaviors. And a manuscript describing the results of the collaboration with the National Institute on Drug Abuse was recently published in the Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence. Turning our attention to the Implementing Genomics in Practice or IGNITE Network, the sites shown here are the first principle and satellite sites to be funded within the network. IGNITE sites assess how knowledge of clinically actionable variants can improve patient care by integrating genetic information like genotype and family history into clinical care. Principal sites aim to implement their genomic medicine programs in the less experienced satellite clinical sites to assess the challenges in translating genomic medicine programs into diverse clinical settings. Participating primary and satellite sites are implementing clinical decision support systems and will be assessing clinical outcomes as well as cost-effectiveness measures. This year, we welcome three new sites to IGNITE. Start on this map. These sites are located at Vanderbilt University, Indiana University and the University of Maryland in Baltimore. Tony Pollan's group at Maryland will expand their Established Personalized Diabetes Medicine Program to enhance the identification and treatment of individuals affected by highly penetrant diabetes gene mutations. At Vanderbilt, Josh Denney's project will assess the impact of integrating pharmacogenetic test results into diverse EHR environments. And David Flockard's site at Indiana will assess whether genotyping, 24 pharmacogenetic variants can improve clinical outcomes and reduce both patient and hospital costs. I'm sorry, hospital and outpatient costs. Moving on to SBIR and STTR grants, NHGRI invests about $12 million in small business grants annually. To give you a flavor, our current portfolio has 25 phase one and 10 phase two awards. Our phase two efforts include decreasing oligonucleotide synthesis costs, molecular barcoding kits for DNA analysis, microfluidic based DNA sequencing, nuclease pro-mediated gene expression analysis using next generation sequencing, enabling high throughput RNA based functional genomics, software for mining next generation DNA sequencing data, and web based database and research engine for genetic discovery, extending genome phenome analysis and exact statistical tools for genetic association studies. Now, the reason we're paying particular attention to this is that our small business allocation will be increasing by a congressionally mandated 0.12% per year of our total budget or about $0.6 million per year for each of the next three years. So we've been actively encouraging small businesses to apply by reaching out to the community and by targeting recent applicants and grantees. We hope that our council also will help get the word out about this opportunity for small businesses, many of which spring out of academic and research laboratories. Now by means of outreach, we'll also be holding a workshop at this year's ASHG annual meeting entitled Building Your Genomics Business with SBIR-STTR Support from NHGRI and NIH. Now as we've discussed at this council in recent meetings, NHGRI recently has looked carefully at our diversity action plan or our DAP program and related to that has now published two notices dealing with the plans for restructuring our DAP program. Now the DAP has been in existence for over 10 years and was extensively reviewed over this past year. A restructuring plan was actually presented at the May Council meeting and these new notices reflect the outcome of the council as well as staff deliberations. The purpose of the notices is really to alert grantees to the continued strong commitment of NHGRI to the DAP program and to announce program modifications. Well, the goal of the DAP program has been refined now and really reflects our desire to prepare students to pursue a PhD or an MD-PhD in a biomedical research area relevant to genomics. Consequently, the program will focus on three career levels, undergraduates, post-baccalaureates and graduate students. The annual DAP meeting will be folded into a new annual meeting for all trainees and scholars participating in NHGRI-supported institutional training grants and career development programs. The DAP students will be encouraged to participate in the annual meeting to enhance their networking and career development opportunities. Now, grantees of the three high-profile programs that anchor the DAP, the large-scale sequencing centers, the large databases and the centers of excellence in genomic science will be given the option to opt out of having a DAP program if they can provide a strong justification for non-participation. Participation, however, will be strongly encouraged. So moving on to NIH Common Fund and Trans-NIH initiatives, starting with the Common Fund. The NIH Council of Councils recently undertook an extensive evaluation of the proposed, about the processes associated with running the NIH Common Fund and this involved interviews and surveys with NIH staff and a review of documentation about the NIH Common Fund planning and program implementation. The report of this evaluation made a number of recommendations about idea planning processes and the post-funding management of the NIH Common Fund. The Common Fund also hit its 10th year of existence and celebrated with a symposium entitled A Decade of Discovery and links to a commemorative book and also a symposium program and videos of the event are available at the links under Document 27. And finally, Francis Collins, a recently co-authored a science perspective with former NIH Director, Dr. Ilya Suhuni, who started the roadmap, that later became the Common Fund and NIH Common Fund's Dr. Elizabeth Wilder on the NIH Common Fund at 10 years. Terms of specific Common Fund initiatives, the Knockout Mouse Phenotyping Project or COMP-2 is jointly funded by the NIH Common Fund and 18 other NIH institutes and centers. It was launched in 2011 with the goal of making and phenotyping 2,500 mouse knockout strains over five years. The annual COMP-2 meeting was held in late June. Reported at that meeting was the deployment of a new version of the project website, which is now populated with phenotype data from over 1,000 knockout mouse strains. The International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium, IMPC, is evaluating the CRISPR technology in a high-throughput production environment. The COMP centers will make and phenotype about 100 knockout strains in order to test the CRISPR method in addition to completing regular production of ES cell-derived mice. And supplemental funds have been awarded to support this pilot project. The NIH Common Fund has also approved a plan to evaluate metabolomic analyses of 100 knockout strains. Work will be performed at the Baylor College of Medicine. And the annual review meeting of the Panel of Scientific Consultants or PSC for this program will occur in November. Moving on, the NIH Human Microbiome Project, or HMP, is now in phase two and is known as integrative HMP or IHMP to reflect the program goal of creating an integrated multi-omic dataset of microbiome and host properties. The IHMP marker paper, which describes the three longitudinal cohort studies on preterm birth, inflammatory bowel disease, and type 2 diabetes, and the data types that are being collected on their data repositories, was recently published in Cell Host and Micro. The paper is in open access from the first day of publication. An IHMP data coordination center is now operational with co-funding provided by the NIH Common Fund and several other NIH centers and offices. And a report on the 2013 NIH meeting Human Microbiome Science Vision for the Future was recently published in the open access BMC journal, Microbiome. The Genotype Tissue Expression, or G-TEX project, aims to study human gene expression and regulation in multiple tissues using genomic analyses of rapid autopsy samples. The goal is to gain key insights into the mechanisms of gene regulation and in the future, the disease-related perturbations associated with those variants. The scale-up phase for G-TEX enrollment is underway to date. About 700 of our projected 900 donors have been enrolled, and nearly 12,500 RNA-seq studies have been completed. Additionally, whole genome sequencing has been added to the pipeline for these samples with the intent of having complete genome sequences of all donors by the end of the project. And also, the G-TEX portal has been revamped with enhanced capabilities. Meanwhile, G-TEX biospecimen access, the mechanism of that has been running smoothly and so far, seven requests for outside investigators to access G-TEX samples have been approved. And G-TEX held its second community scientific meeting at the Broad Institute in June. The meeting hit its capacity with 250 registered attendees from eight countries and 15 speakers from outside and within the G-TEX consortium gave presentations demonstrating the wide range of analyses that can be performed using G-TEX data. The next Common Fund project is Protein Capture Reagents Program, the goal of which is to pilot the development of a community resource of low-cost, high-quality, renewable affinity reagents for human proteins and to develop technologies for next-generation platforms. The five-year pilot project has just entered its fourth year and currently there are over 400 validated monoclonal and recombinant antibodies to human transcription factor proteins available for low-cost purchase through the Protein Capture Data Portal, shown here. Meanwhile, the Protein Capture Reagents Program will hold its fourth annual consortium meeting in mid-December in Bethesda. Meanwhile, Lynx 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. Lynx uses computational tools to integrate this diverse information into a comprehensive view of normal and disease states that can be applied for the development of new biomarkers and therapeutics. Now, the pilot phase of Lynx has concluded and phase two began this summer with a Lynx multi-program meeting held in July that focused on collaborations with other programs like ENCODE, GTX, and the Common Fund Epigenomics Program. The funding announcement for the new phase two investigators will be released in early September and the Lynx phase two consortium meeting will be in October. Finally, the funding plan for the Big Data to Knowledge BD2K Lynx Data Integration and Coordination Center was approved by the BD2K Multi-Council Working Group. Turning our attention to the H3Africa initiative, the fourth H3Africa consortium meeting took place in late May in Cape Town, South Africa, and was attended by over 200 participants. Highlights included increased participation of trainees and young investigators and satellite workshops on cardiovascular disease, ethics, and genome analysis. The H3Africa marker paper has been published in Science. Related policy documents have been finalized and posted on the H3Africa website. Notice of awards were issued last month for two new H3Africa LC grants with projects based in Nigeria and Ethiopia. And the fifth H3Africa consortium meeting will be held in November in Tanzania. Workshops are being planned to discuss sickle cell disease, grant writing, and the development of a custom genotyping chip. The Undiagnosed Diseases Network, UDN, aims to improve the level of diagnosis and care for patients with undiagnosed diseases, facilitating research into the etiology of undiagnosed diseases, and create an integrated and collaborative research community among laboratory and clinical investigators. In doing so, the network will investigate these new and rare diseases and share this understanding so as to improve options for optimal patient care. Well, in June, six medical centers around the country were awarded UDN clinical site grants to select from the most difficult to solve medical cases and together develop effective approaches to diagnose them. So the six new clinical sites are located at Baylor College of Medicine, at Duke University, Harvard Teaching Hospitals, Stanford Medicine, UCLA, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center. The network also includes a seventh clinical site within the NIH Intramural Research Program. And these seven UDN clinical sites recently joined the UDN Coordinating Center at Harvard Medical School for the inaugural UDN Steering Committee meeting. And key personnel from each of the UDN sites were in attendance to ratify UDN's manual of operations and establish standardized procedures prior to the first UDN patient being accepted. And we're excited to have these new clinical sites joining the network and look forward to them seeing patients very soon. It's also important to note that for the present time, all applications to the UDN must come to the NIH clinical site. So moving beyond the Common Fund to Trans-NIH Initiatives, let me talk about a number of things related to the Trans-NIH Big Data to Knowledge Initiative, which of course aims to enable scientists to capitalize on big data and use it to advance biomedical research. Now Phil Bourne, the NIH Associate Director for Data Science, will be speaking later in the open session to provide his vision for data science at NIH as well as some additional details about BD2K. But I just wanted to provide some updates and highlights about things that we've talked about at this council. To start with, the Centers of Excellence Applications were approved by this council in May and a funding plan has been approved by the BD2K Multiconsult Working Group, which I'll describe in greater detail in a minute. The LINX BD2K Perturbation Data Coordination and Integration Center is a collaboration between BD2K and the LINX Common Fund Program. It is the first NIH-initiated Center of Excellence and a funding plan has been approved by the BD2K Multiconsult Working Group and will be discussed later in closed session. The funding plan for the Data Discovery Index Coordination Consortium has also been approved by the Multiconsult Working Group. This includes a coordinating center and a set of administrative supplements to existing NIH grantees to form a consortium. All of the awards will be made in September with fiscal year 2014 money. And the investigators from all funded programs in BD2K will be attending a joint kickoff meeting in November. In terms of training, the BD2K Training Program has completed a review of applications in response to three FOAs. One for Mentored Career Development Awards, one for Short Courses on Biomedical Big Data and one for Open Educational Resources. These have been through the BD2K Multiconsult Working Group and assigned to various institutes and centers. The FOAs for the T32 grants for pre-doctoral training in Biomedical Big Data was released in late July and another round will be released next July. And the Targeted Software Development FOA has been released and the applications were received in June. There was a robust response from the community to this FOA and the applications that come in will eventually come to this council at the February 2015 meeting. Well, speaking of the BD2K Multiconsult Working Group, let me say a few words more. As was explained at the last council meeting, BD2K cannot issue FOAs on its own and its money comes from all the NIH institutes and centers and so therefore it's important to have programmatic and scientific input from representatives from all the institutes and centers. Therefore, not just have that input coming from the council associated with the institute that actually issued the FOA. So for that reason, the BD2K Multiconsult Working Group which really is the first of its kind at NIH was to create it to provide council level review of BD2K applications. Typically this group will meet prior to council meetings so that can review BD2 applications before they're approved by the individual councils. To date, this group has met twice by conference call to discuss the various BD2K programmatic components that I've just mentioned to you. But so far, the group has only been asked to review applications and paylists recommended by BD2K staff. But in the future, it's really hoped that this group will be get involved in providing input about possible future BD2K programs and FOAs. Okay, moving on to the institute's Division of Policy Communications and Education. The Genomics and Medicine Lecture Series culminated in June. This series represented a collaboration involving NHGRI, Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, and Johns Hopkins University. It was launched in 2011 and consisted of 25 lectures. The lecture series was intended to educate healthcare professionals about the increasing role of genomics in clinical care. And it began with an introductory lecture on current knowledge of the human genome, and that included a number of lectures on the topics that are shown on this slide. The speakers were all experts in their fields from NHGRI and other NIH institutes and centers, and also from Johns Hopkins University. Importantly, video recordings of all the lectures were made and are now available on NHGRI's Genome TV channel of YouTube. Of interest, at the end of July, the FDA released a long-awaited detail about its draft guidance for the regulation of laboratory-developed tests, or LDTs. Currently, if a molecular diagnostic test is developed and only performed in a single laboratory, it is classified as an LDT and receives no regulatory oversight before coming to market. This is in contrast to requirements of similar diagnostics that are marketed as kits and sold to multiple laboratories, even if the substance of the test is the same. While the FDA has stated for many years that it would like to level this playing field and the much-anticipated draft guidance spells out how it proposes to do so. While the FDA plans to phase in their oversight through a risk-based approach for regulating LDTs with continued enforcement discretion, that is a hands-off approach for many tests, including the lower-risk tests such as those for rare diseases. Now, beginning 12 months after the guidelines are finalized, those tests that the FDA considers to be moderate and high-risk LDTs will be subject to the same kinds of clearance or approval process as test kits. The FDA plans to hold public meetings to engage with stakeholders before finalizing the LDT guidance in the coming months. Now, in addition to publishing the draft LDT guidance, the FDA also published the final guidance for getting approvals of in vitro companion diagnostic devices. Now, this guidance is intended to assist both developers of drugs seeking FDA approval where the use of a companion diagnostic is essential for a therapeutic safety and effectiveness and for developers of the diagnostic devices themselves. The final guidance clarifies that, in most cases, the FDA would like to approve the therapeutic and the companion diagnostic at the same time, and that companion diagnostic will go through FDA's clearance or approval process using the same risk-based approach, currently used for test kits and currently being developed for laboratory develop tests. It also states, however, that in cases where a therapy is intended to treat a serious or life-threatening condition and there is no satisfactory alternatives on the market, it may approve the drug even if the diagnostic has not yet passed regulatory muster. In June, the NHGRI Education and Community Involvement Branch partnered with the National Congress of American Indians and the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian to host a symposium called A Spectrum of Perspectives, Native Peoples and Genetic Research. The event was held at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. The symposium featured four panel discussions with speakers who represented an array of tribal affiliations, scholarly disciplines and viewpoints. These conversations range from whether and how genetics research impacts American Indian and Alaska Native health, genomics and ancestry, training and health career pathways for native researchers, and the ethics of blood, including viewpoints on specimen handling and identity. The conversation with the audience was rich and informative and has already led to further discussions with stakeholders. In mid-May, NHGRI's Education and Community Involvement Branch partnered with the Brooklyn Public Library and the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture to honor the legacy of Henrietta Lacks at a community-based event entitled We Speak Your Name, Exploring the Life of Henrietta Lacks, Heroine of Modern Science and Medicine. Students, educators and audience members representing diverse cultures and socioeconomic demographics, met at the Brooklyn Library to examine important questions in ancestry and genomics and culture, and to explore issues of race, class, gender and bioethics through the story of Mrs. Lacks. Members of the Lacks family were present as the community honored Mrs. Lacks and publicly recognized her life and tremendous contributions to science and medicine. To commemorate the event, NHGRI created a graphical timeline shown here on the slide that highlights the various contributions that have been made to biomedical research through the use of HeLa cells. This timeline was given to participants attending the Brooklyn Library program and is available for download on genome.gov. In addition to being a useful reference, we anticipate the timeline will be an excellent classroom resource. The NHGRI summer workshop in genomics, commonly known as the short course, was held on the NIH campus in August. This intensive four-day program focused on the latest updates in the changing landscape of genomics. The participants included faculty from universities and colleges that train students from various communities currently underrepresented in biomedical research, including racial and ethnic minority as well as rural communities. This is the second time that the short course has also included graduate students from underrepresented backgrounds in science who are pursuing careers in genomics. This short course's scientific program was presented by 32 NHGRI and NIH staff members. And finally, the Division of Policy Communications and Education will soon launch a search for someone to become the chief of the communications and public liaison branch. In essence, this person serves as the communications director for NHGRI, a very important position for the institute. So if any of you know of good candidates to suggest, please contact me or Laura Rodriguez. And finally, just a couple things from the NHGRI intramural research program. First of all, this year, Bill Gaul in the center here, who's NHGRI's clinical director and founding director of the undiagnosed diseases program received the NIH Allen S. Rapson Award for clinical care. This honor is now given each year to a physician in the NIH intramural research program for scientific and medical excellence and the outstanding compassionate care for patients and their families. So congratulations to Bill. Other highlights from the NHGRI's intramural program since the last council meeting include Ellen Sudranski's group and colleagues at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, or NCATS, successfully coaxed culture cells to exhibit the signature traits of Gaul's disease and use this model to test a drug compound that corrects the malfunctioning cells. Their work was published in Science Translational Medicine. Les Beeseker and Harvard Medical Schools' Robert Green coauthored a report in the New England Journal of Medicine that provides guidance for clinicians in the use of genome sequence information. And Yingzi Yang's group and collaborators described the role of genes involved in the plantar polarity of cilia cells that coordinate circulation of cerebral spinal fluid, and their study was published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And again, before any of my director's report, I wanna put in a plug and say 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 get to that and subscribe to if you're interested. And finally, my usual thanks to everyone who helped put this director's report together. NHGRI staff works hard to get all the slides and information together. And if it wasn't for that group effort, this just wouldn't be possible. And also additional thanks to the communications group and the web team for getting all the documents together and up on the electronic resource. And as always, a special thanks to Chris Wetterstrand. Once again, a photo of her in recent activity shown here as part of the entourage giving Jim Watson a tour of the genome exhibition at the Smithsonian. Of course, Chris serves as the ringleader in coordinating material development helps me pull the final PowerPoint presentation together. So thank you for your attention and I'm happy to take any immediate questions that you have. Derek, yeah, David. Derek, what's, way back the, let me see, the biographical sketches. Expanding to five pages. Could you comment on the rationale? I mean, it's just, in some sense, it's striking when paired with the, several years ago, shortening of the research proposal itself. So the ratio between the bio sketch and the research section has shifted dramatically or will have shifted dramatically with this change. So I'll take the first whack. Anybody else like Betty who've been involved in the discussions at the extramural leadership level because there's been a lot of coordination debate. My memory when this was discussed, Institute Director's table was part of the reason for the expansion was to go hand in hand with the section that allows you to be more descriptive in trying to summarize your accomplishments or your contributions to science. That because that was more open-ended and not just a list of publications, but to give you a chance to describe yourself, describe your contribution that they wanted to, my understanding is that part of it was to give room for that textural summary of yourself. Betty, is that consistent with, wanna go to a microphone or come up here, you'd be welcome to. I think it's fair to say that there was one NIH Institute Director who felt that as currently formatted, the biosketch was not very informative. You just list what you're going to do, it gives no indication of the impact that research had. So the idea was, and I think the format for the Howard Hughes is very similar to this. And so the thinking was that format was far more informative for the reviewers as to the PI's impact on science. So that was the reason for the expansion. Not so much the expansion, but in order to give reviewers more information about a particular person. There was also the comment that this format might not be the best for a new PI, but the feeling was that the reviewers were intelligent enough to be able to sort of apparse that new person versus an established principle investigator. So Carol and then Jill. So yeah, Betty, you addressed my concern, which was new investigators describing their impact on science is gonna be difficult. So will there be alternative guidelines for new investigators for what to put in that section? I don't think there's anything in that respect. I think it's going to be more along the lines of the scientific review officers making that explanation at the time of the review. Can I add to that? Because actually that was one thing that I certainly, this was talked about around Institute Director's Table. I actually think in some ways this, at least young investigators in genomics, this might help them. From the point of view of, let's say they've been involved in big consortium where they're buried among 100 authors and they just list that as one of the key papers and people say, I want one of many authors. This gives them textural chance to say, this is what I did in that consortium as a postdoctoral fellow maybe, or as a first or second year faculty member. So I think young investigators now get a chance to be far more descriptive about what they've done in a way that maybe will make them even look strong. Jill. So in the past, when the personal statement was put into place, you know, section, is that A, I think, yeah, section A. Many people use the beginning of that section to do something similar, although much more concisely. So is section A, the personal statement, going to be redefined or redesigned to really just focus on your role in the proposed project rather than giving the usual background that most of us give there? I think this is all part of the pilot, and I know NCI has had a couple of pilots going around that. And so the pilots will be evaluated and more information will be coming out about how this will really be implemented. Again, my impression was that that personal statement would not be the place where you would be linking to publications and telling a scientific story. You may tell a story about yourself, but not drill into highlights of scientific accomplishment linked to papers. And that's what this free text section is supposed to allow you to do in greater detail than was previously possible. Bob. Say that new free text linked to publications is very much in line with a lot of university committees on promotions and appointments as doing. Exactly that, to try to figure out what an individual's contribution was to a team science publication. Which I think for genomics is going to be very helpful in particular, obviously other areas as well, but in particular genomics. And I think there are a couple of other efforts going on that are sort of ancillary, but will converge with this. And these are things like ORCID and science, there's a new name for it where people can put all of their publications up in the web and those can be modified as you make your publications. And then this is going to be a way of enriching the format for the biosketch. So there are several issues that are converging to enhance this. Happy to. Yeah, Eric, we'll add one other thing in terms of contributions from NHGRI to the more general activity is that there are three people that are involved with NHGRI that are on the NIH-wide Hela Genome Advisory Committee. That's me and Russ Altman and Rick Myers. So we're contributing that to the overall effort. Yeah, thanks, good point. Okay, we will move on. Phil Bourne, is that you in the back of your room? You can make your way up to the podium, is this talk loaded? Or we're about to do that. We're gonna have to switch over away from my laptop. While Phil is making his way here, let me just say a few things. This council is extremely familiar with all these developments in data science for a variety of reasons. One, I've kept you very informed about this because it's of great interest and of great importance to the Institute but also two members of the council, Jill Mezrov and Lucila, were both members of the original working group of the advisory committee director that studied this issue and came out with a series of excellent recommendations and one of the key recommendations was the creation of a new leadership position at NIH called the NIH Associate Director for Data Science and since I served in an acting capacity of that, I brought all these issues and familiarity to this council on a regular basis and then meanwhile this council has been asked to do some of the heavy lifting early on in terms of things coming for approvals and et cetera, et cetera. So it was not surprising at all to me that when I announced an earlier council meeting that an individual, Phil Bourne, had been appointed to this new position. This council said please have Phil come and talk to us as soon as possible. We protected him a little. I didn't wanna make him do it the first week or two. He was on the job but we certainly tried to get it scheduled promptly and so this was the meeting that's worked out well and so again, I know Phil is going around and talking to many councils and many groups. I think this group is probably the most informed about the activities in BD2K and the need for such a new position and so I know it's gonna be a very important and productive discussion. So Phil.