 Well, thank you, Anastasia. Let me actually start by giving a big thanks to Anastasia, who and her NIH team of people, the working group, for their hard work in this program, but also in their most immediate work of setting up this important planning workshop. So it's been very valuable to have a great NIH team at the helm, and they truly are terrific. And Anastasia is doing a terrific job at this. I was asked to both welcome all of you, and I do welcome all of you, to a Monday morning in Bethesda, or I guess we're technically in Rockville. But also to set a context and a little bit of history for the program, which I'm happy to do because I've been involved, at least as a facilitator and a fan of the UDP, UDN, really, for the better part of eight or more years, mostly with the person sitting to my left, Bill Gaul. I would also tell you that the program has been administratively led by NHGRI almost from the beginning, and the Institute has been delighted to do that, and has been heavily involved in making sure that the intramural component and now the extramural component runs smoothly because we firmly believe in the mission of this program. For those of you who may not fully appreciate the history, I don't want to go through too many details, but I was asked to give a little bit of this to set a context. It didn't always exist. It didn't always exist as a common fund project. It really came to be around 2008, actually at a time when the NIH Clinical Center within our intramural program was looking for ways to really take advantage of the outstanding infrastructure and the outstanding capabilities that the Clinical Center had. And actually, Bill Gaul at that time started to recognize that there could be an opportunity for really using the Clinical Center more effectively, and basically got the support of the Office of Rare Disease Research, and then actually came and talked to me. I was then the intramural director of the Institute, and we said we should really bring sign forward. We should try to do something along the lines of an undiagnosed diseases program, although I don't think it was being called it quite that way at the time. And we got more support from then Institute Director Francis Collins and then went to leadership of NIH at that time, Ilya Serhouni, to see if this was of something of interest to NIH leadership. And it caught on as a pilot project within the intramural program, getting the name the Undiagnosed Diseases Program. As I mentioned, it was housed even starting then within NHGRI, but it was really trans NIH in nature, but it was led by Bill, but he increasingly picked up other people from across the NIH to help, especially in the NIH Clinical Center. The pilot was largely regarded as incredibly successful by almost any metric, but it was a pilot, and it was actually on a short leash funding-wise, although Ilya Serhouni was incredibly helpful as he was literally leaving the NIH to give sufficient funds to keep it going as a pilot. But the money was about to run out, and Bill recognized this, and it was very clear it had to continue, at least, and actually our initial aim was to make sure it just stayed healthy and adequately funded within the intramural program. And so Bill came to me to talk about what next. At that point, actually, I was then the Institute Director in a different office, a different chair, a different venue, but it was also very clear we needed to have a longer term financial stability and budgetary stability for the program. So we started lots of conversations around the NIH about how best to keep this incredibly successful program going. We found our way back to the NIH leadership, who at that point was then Francis Collins as the new NIH Director, and conversations took place. It eventually went in front of the Institute and Center Directors, and the idea, I think fairly spontaneously, and Jim Anderson, the head of the Common Fund, sitting to my right, was at that meeting. The idea was, well, why don't we make this part of the NIH Common Fund and why don't we nationalize this in some fashion? And that idea bubbled up spontaneously and I think was quickly embraced across the NIH by the Institute and Center Directors, and really the rest is history. It then morphed in many ways, picking up even greater representation across the NIH as all Common Fund projects do. We also picked up additional leadership partnership in the National Institute of Neurology and Neurological Diseases and Stroke, and you're going to hear from Walter in a second about that, and it's been, I think, incredibly remarkable how quickly this network has been set up, basically starting just with a nascent component, about a very strong one within the intramural program, but then having to take on all the mechanical aspects of actually having extramural aspects of this as well, as is the case for almost all Common Fund programs. And so that really is the story behind it. I actually, when I woke up this morning, I was thinking, what's an analogy I can make to how this history has been, and I thought of the analogy of the movie The Wizard of Oz, and it was working for a while, because in many ways we've sort of gone around and have talked to people and have been told, go talk to here and get this, and then we've talked to people, just turn levers and make money up here. And all of that analogy was working great until I realized that to make the story really effective, Bill was going to have to be Dorothy. And I'm telling you, I've seen Bill in a dress once before, and it's really not pretty. So it was not a good, so I didn't go with that story. I just went straight with the facts. So in terms of this workshop, I guess I would say these are important. They're not purely symbolic. On the one hand, a planning meeting like this is actually required in some fashion when thinking about a second phase of any common fund project. So I think their aspect of this is we have to check a box off, because what's the main focus of this meeting is thinking about the future. And in the case of common fund programs, they get an initial phase, and then they could potentially renew for a second phase. And so the common fund will want to evaluate whether there's really robust future directions to justify a second phase. So there's that aspect of it, but I actually want to really emphasize that these sorts of consortium as they grow up do absolutely benefit from gatherings like this that sort of take stock of how they're going and then think about future directions. I can tell you that at NHGRI where our extramural program has many consortium that we've run over the years starting with the Human Genome Project. But now probably many dozen or two or three, we have workshops like this that provide key moments in the history of programs and consortia. Because we realize how valuable it is to get people both involved and not directly involved in programs into a room, often in Bethesda or Rockville. And strategize for a day or two to help us think through and they're always proved to be extremely valuable. And I'm sure today's meeting will be just the same. And so again, we think this is very, very valuable for the UDN and we appreciate all of you coming in. We also recognize that this is very valuable for the community here about what's being discussed. Towards that end, we are live video casting this. In fact, the NHGRI communications group sitting behind me who are terrific at their job are here live broadcasting this. But we'll also be video archiving the video of the day and we'll be available forever and for people to access. So remember that as you're talking. But also, I tell your colleagues, I mean the point is there's a lot of interest in this program both in the United States and abroad. And I would not be surprised if when we post this video, many people from around the world will watch in on this workshop to hear about what people gathered today had to say about the future of this kind of activity because they'll be interested for their institutions and for their countries. So with that, I will turn this over to my good colleague, Walter Corshens.