 So good morning. I'm Sharon Plon and Dan Mays and I were asked to just co-chair today's workshop. This is an exciting day and we're looking at the work of the Emerge Network and what one can prophesize can go on beyond this. And really in particular, the focus is going to be the future of genomics as it relates to research and clinical work using the electronic medical record. So Dan is going to chair the morning session and keeping everyone on time and then I'll do some introductory things about how we're going to handle the panels. Okay so without further ado, to keep our very compact agenda on time, the opening session is essentially to establish the context for the more detailed panels that will follow. And there's no better context setter than the director of the Genome Institute, Eric Green. You have the floor, Eric. Thank you, yes that is my job as context. So good morning everyone and I did have nothing to do with the early start but we do recognize we're trying to accomplish a lot in a day and I think that was part of the rationale. First thing I should say is thank all of you for coming. As always, I am just deeply grateful to people who are willing to travel to Bethesda from an invitation that comes from us to help strategize about something and amazingly the vast majority of people who we invite are willing to travel which is oftentimes not that fun to come sit in a windowless room such as this where we are hardly feeding and taking good care of you or anything like that so we don't even provide you coffee but you're always willing to give substantial amounts of input to us in context like this and as always I'm just very grateful to the broader genomics and biomedical research community for your willingness to really help really and truly do influence what we try to put together and to sort of developing programs and thinking about the future of what we need to accomplish at the institute. I really want I'm going to be very brief in my remarks there's going to be sort of others going to follow me or going to continually to set a broader context. I did just want to make two comments. One that is just a comment that as you might imagine meetings like this where we're looking at specific elements of the extramural portfolio really are part of a ongoing constant effort of strategic planning for our entire institute but in this particular case for extramural portfolio this very much feeds into broader discussions and broader strategic planning that is always ongoing at the institute but in particular but without really giving too many details I would just point out that currently the institute's sort of strategic vision is sort of encapsulated in the strategic plan that we published in Nature in 2011 and 2011 in genomics time is a long time ago so it might not surprise people to hear that the institute is very much in the midst of sort of figuring out what's sort of the next round of strategic planning that's going to go on because you can imagine even with a 2011 strategic plan you can't keep using that document for very long because the field moves forward and you want to articulate a new vision so I don't have anything to formally announce today but needless to say probably in early next year you'll be hearing announcements from the institute regarding sort of sort of the next stage the next set of processes that'll go into place around strategic planning as we've done multiple times dating back to the human genome project I can also tell you that a strategic planning process the way we conduct it is usually at least a two-year process this doesn't get happened overnight now I'm setting you setting this up as a context just to point out that was something I think many of the topics we're going to talk about and emerge as a program really exemplifies the cutting edge of some aspects of genomics that we hold near and dear to our heart and here we are going to have a strategic discussion today about this I well it won't sort of a fit it's happening before we're going to undergo this sort of next round of strategic planning I can tell you it very much is is is is sort of going to be part of that process just sort of predating when the process will officially start and so we're already thinking about how the things we'll discuss today will relate to other things we'll be discussing in subsequent conversations and workshops and in various ways we will be engaging the community and so just keep in mind while the advice you're giving and maybe and the input and things we're going to talk about recommendations are specifically framed around encode I guarantee you they will be feeding into a worry what I say in code I'm sorry it's too early for me and it's both start with E but do correct me emerge it will absolutely feed into numerous other discussions across our entire portfolio which will even touch encode I have to work my encode back into that so so that's the first thing I wanted to point out to you the second thing I want to point out to you which is very obvious from the the even the opening set of speakers is that I do think we're in a different place now with emerge and thinking about what it is it is accomplishing what its goals are and and what other things are going on around it and so I think and I know we're going to talk about this today which is one of the reasons why we're going to hear early on from people representing all of us and people representing the million veterans program and so forth because you know clearly the world's a different place now than even when the current round of our merge began and so what I'm going to be in particular looking for and and and wanting the discussion to make sure to include is sort of in thinking forward for this kind of research activity that NHGRI is doing how how is that synergizing interacting augmenting collaborating use all those sorts of words with these other efforts because I think the the the strength of what we bring to the table is is is very clear in some ways but we are shouldn't be doing this alone and and without taking into account these other efforts some of which are obviously of great importance to the NIH or to the United States and and in so many ways I just want to think about what's the best use of our resources in that in this in this area and how best to to situate that so that maximally benefiting all of the science being done by our efforts and these other efforts and even some international efforts as well so I that's one of the things I'm going to be looking for in particular we recognize that that was a key part of this which is why you're going to hear early presentations on at least two other important entities that is all of us a million veterans program so with that I think I'm going to turn this over to wrongly who's going to now take over and just say a few more things in terms of opening remarks thank you yeah thank you so much thank each of you on behalf of the emerging team at NHGRI we understand that today is a one-day meeting but before today you have done tremendous work to make this a workshop to be successful and to be productive we have four working groups working on this issue two months before and also you discussed among each group now today is opening to everyone to talk about this four specific topics today so I don't want to add too many things our appreciation to each of you so I just want to make sure that the emerging team the whole team appreciates all your work and your efforts you're part thank you