 Well, as Rudy mentioned, the reminder we are videotaping and video archiving, and that includes this director's report and all of its associated documents. Just as a reminder, if you're watching this for the first time, you should be aware that we have an electronic resource established, associated with my director's report each time, analogous to supplemental materials of a published paper. The URL for that is shown at the bottom of the slide. And for all the slides that I'm going to be showing, you can access any time, either as a PDF or as the actual PowerPoint file. In addition, as I march along my slides, many of them will have in the bottom right-hand corner a document number that reflects a place that you can go to this website where you can see as enumerated, there will be links with lots of additional documents, links to websites, and various other materials that we think is of relevance. And all of this is going to be archived permanently on genome.gov as a permanent historic record of this meeting. Well, there's going to be several other presentations during the open session, and that my director's report will be tailored around them, so I'm not going to discuss in detail some of the things that others are going to cover. Immediately following my director's report, we'll have the first of several concept clearances, specifically Mike Payson will present a report from a workshop entitled From Genome Function to Biomedical Insight and Code and Beyond. And then this workshop really set the stage for a concept clearance that at least Fine Gold is going to present on functional genomics. Then after lunch, we're going to showcase one of our programs in our genome sequencing program, specifically Gal Jarvik is going to give a presentation on the clinical sequence and exploratory research program. And then Les Beeseker from our institute's intramural research program will provide an overview of the NHGRI ClinSeq program, which is also affiliated with the clinical sequence and exploratory research program. We selected these two presentations to provide counsel and illustrative update about some of the clinical genomics research projects being supported by the institute. We'll then shift gears back to concepts, and we'll have two remaining concept clearances, the Tina Gatlin is going to then present a concept on data analysis and coordinating center for diversity action plans and institutional training grants. And lastly, Mike Smith is going to give a report from a recent workshop on genomic technology development, which then provided important input for the development of a concept that he's going to present entitled Genomic Technology Development. So that's the plan for the open session, and I'm going to cover my usual seven areas in my director's report, starting with some general updates about NHGRI. And the main updates relate to some departures. First of all, after serving 11 years as NHGRI's Chief Grants Management Officer, Cheryl Chick retired on April 3 of this year. While leading the grants management branch, Cheryl faced many end of year and a fiscal year crunches, but she never failed to get the job done. At NHGRI, she experienced more than her fair share of funding gymnastics for common fund projects, trans-NIH initiatives, stimulus packages, and so forth. She was absolutely terrific at her job, and she certainly will be missed, but we wish her all the best in retirement. And Monica Christman is now serving as the Acting Chief Grants Management Officer while a search for permanent replacement is conducted. A quasi-departure from NHGRI will occur this summer. For the past four years, Karen Rothenberg has served as a Senior Advisor to me as the NHGRI Director in the area of Genomics and Society while on an extended sabbatical from the University of Maryland School of Law. She's been a constant source of support to me as a new Institute Director, and her advice helped us establish the Division of Genomics and Society of our Extramural Research Program. She's even created opportunities for me to hone my acting skills with some of her genomics and theater projects, and even has recruited some council members as I look across in C. Jim Evans, who has also made an equally big fool of himself in these endeavors. This summer, Karen will officially return to the University of Maryland where she will help coordinate an externship for law students at NHGRI. She will also continue to work on a number of genomics and theater projects, and I wanted to personally thank Karen for all of her contributions to NHGRI, especially for those over the last four years. So those are the main NHGRI updates, now turning our attention to NIH updates. Well, after nearly five years, my good friend and colleague and in many ways mentor, Harold Varmas, ended his tenure as Director of the National Cancer Institute. I have the pleasure of collaborating with Harold on a number of joint NCI NHGRI efforts, most notably the Cancer Genome Atlas, or TCGA program, and learning much from him around the Institute Director's Table. We've also enjoyed having Harold's research laboratory within the NHGRI intramural program. Well, his scientific leadership really has been invaluable to NCI and also to NIH, and we wish him all the best in his future pursuits in New York City. Another actually good friend and colleague, Doug Lowy, previously an NCI Deputy Director, will now serve as Acting Director of the NCI. Jack White-Sgarver, who has led the NIH Office of AIDS Research since 2000, will step down from that position in the effect of July 1. Under Dr. White-Sgarver's leadership, the NIH Office of AIDS Research has developed and supported international research and training collaboration. It's supported domestic research programs to address HIV and minority populations and expanded efforts to address HIV in women and girls. Elisio Perez-Stable has been named the Director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, or NIMHD. He will oversee the Institute's $270 million a year budget to conduct and support research, training, and research capacity and infrastructure development, as well as public education and information dissemination programs to improve minority health and reduce health disparities. Elisio comes to NIH from the University of California, San Francisco, where he is currently a Professor of Medicine, Chair of the Division of General Internal Medicine, or Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine, Director of the Center for Aging and Diverse Communities. He's expected to join NIH in September. And Adrienne Hallett has been appointed the new NIH Associate Director for Legislative Policy and Analysis. She comes to the NIH with 14 years of experience on the staff of the United States Senate Committee on Appropriations, where she's served most recently as Senior Policy Advisor. During her tenure on that committee, she worked with Senator Harkin to conceptualize, draft, and promote the Accelerating Biomedical Research Act. It's a great addition to NIH, having someone with that sort of hill experience now in this new role. On March 23rd, NIH issued a position statement on the use of public or private cloud systems for storing and analyzing controlled access genomic data obtained under the NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy. The new position now allows investigators to request permission to transfer controlled access genomic and associated phenotypic data obtained from the NIH-designated data repositories under the auspices of the Genomic Data Sharing Policy to public or private cloud systems for data storage and analysis. Now, NIH expects data users' institutions to ensure that cloud computing systems meet the same data use and security standards as those expected for local computing systems, as outlined in the NIH Security Best Practices for Controlled Access Data Subject to the NIH GDS or Genomic Data Sharing Policy. Now, cloud environments are also expected to meet any institutional IT security requirements and policies. Now, as a reminder, the NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy went into effect on January 25th of this year. And as the Chair of the Internal NIH Oversight Committee for this policy and as Director of the Institute that's been the leader in data sharing since the earliest days of the Human Genome Project, I'm committed to ensuring that NHGRI remains a leader in implementing the Genomic Data Sharing Policy, both within our extramural and intramural research programs. Another topic of great interest around NIH relates to reproducibility. NIH has launched a new website, a portal, to provide information about the efforts underway by NIH to enhance rigor and reproducibility in scientific research. The portal houses the principles and guidelines for reporting preclinical research, agreed to during the June 2014 Joint Workshop that NIH held with the Nature Publishing Group and Science on these issues. The principles and guidelines include best practices, statistical analyses, transparency and reporting, data and material sharing, and consideration of refutation. It also serves as a resource for NIH rigor and reproducibility information needs, such as online training, publications, and meetings. This past March, the Patel Technology Partnership Practice published a report on how NIH funding drives innovation. And I thought you might be interested because the results also highlight NHGRI's commitment to technology development. The report authors found that NIH-funded research generated one patent for every $16.9 million invested between 2000 and 2013. Now as shown on this figure, the report also looked at patents generated by research funding from each NIH Institute and Center. And note the light blue sphere for NHGRI at the far right of this figure. Now while NHGRI had an average number of patents per dollar spent, as illustrated by the size of the NHGRI circle on this figure, NHGRI-stimulated patents were exceptional in being highly forward-sided, meaning they were integral to subsequent technological developments. So from 2000 to 2013, NHGRI-funded research was responsible for 448 patents, with an average of 11.2 citations per patent. In budget terms for every $100 million spent on research, NHGRI-stimulated 6.7 patents and also $263.5 million in downstream R&D funding. Moving on to appropriations, which I'm sure is of great interest, and over the past two months Congress has been examining the President's budget request for fiscal year 2016. Now you will recall that in February, the President sent Congress a proposed budget for the next fiscal year that requests $31.1 billion for NIH, including $515 million for NHGRI, as indicated in the far right column. Now on March 3rd, Francis Collins testified before the House Appropriations Labor HHS Subcommittee in a hearing on NIH's proposed budget. And on April 30th, the Senate counterpart held its NIH hearing. A particular relevance from the genomics perspective is that there was much interest in hearing, in both of the hearings, from members of Congress regarding details of the Precision Medicine Initiative. More broadly, there was bipartisan support at both hearings for NIH, but of course it's unclear whether and how this will translate to increased NIH funding next fiscal year. As another positive indicator of the level of support for NIH, two members of the Senate Labor HHS Subcommittee, Senators Richard Durbin and Lindsey Graham, announced this month that they are forming a Senate NIH caucus to educate senators about the importance of NIH and biomedical research. And they plan to launch the caucus at an event that's actually being held tomorrow. You might also recall that the House Committee on Energy and Commerce released a draft version of the 21st Century Cures Act earlier this year. And this proposal aims to accelerate the rate of discovery in biomedical research and its translation to treatments and cures. And to update you, on April 29th, the committee issued a new draft of the legislation. And this new bill contains significant differences compared with the previous draft, including a new NIH Innovation Fund, which provides $10 billion of new mandatory funding for NIH phased in over the next five years. Now the day after the release of this draft legislation, the Committee's Health Subcommittee held a hearing with Dr. Kathy Hudson, NIH Deputy Director for Science, Outreach, and Policy, testifying along with representatives from the Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Hudson thanked the committee for many provisions in the bill, including the proposed budget increase. A particular relevance for NIHGRI, Dr. Hudson requested that the committee consider in addition to the bill establishing that individual level genomic data be deemed as confidential. Now last week, the Health Subcommittee on the Energy and Commerce Committee approved this legislation, and the full committee is scheduled to consider this bill later this week. Then on May 5th, the Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor, and Pensions held a hearing entitled Continuing Americans Leadership, Realizing the Promise of Precision Medicine for Patients. Francis Collins was one of the witnesses, but it also included a panel that included representatives from the Food and Drug Administration and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. The hearing was well attended by committee members, and there was clear bipartisan interest in the details of the Precision Medicine Initiative, such as examples being that they asked questions about the makeup of the large cohort, how the research participants were going to be recruited, and so forth, all good questions. This hearing was the latest in a series that the committee is holding as part of their Innovation for Healthy Americans Initiative to assess the impact and efficiency of the FDA and the NIH. At the end of the hearing, Committee Chairman Senator Alexander indicated that it is his hope to complete the committee's work on the initiative by the end of 2015. So moving on from NIH to general genomics update, first some awards, starting with David Hausler. Recently, David received the Dan David Prize of 2015 for the future time dimension in the field of bioinformatics. The Dan David Prize recognizes and encourages innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms. The prize covers three time dimensions, past, present, future, that represents realms of human achievement. And the future category focuses on breakthroughs that hold great promise for improvement of our world. So congratulations, David. Similar congratulations go out to members recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences. They announced their new elected members several weeks ago of relevance to the genomics community. The newly elected members include Mary Ann Bronner, Eravinda Chakravarti, Scott Edwards, John Liz, Yaka Messing, and Rod Rothstein. And then a former council member deserves congratulations. Former council member, Dee Dee Meldrum, was elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering's College of Fellows. Dee Dee was recognized for her outstanding contributions and pioneering work in the automation of innovative single cell analysis systems for discovering biosignatures that predict human health and disease. The odd awards to just simple transitions focusing on council. So council member, Howard, Jacob is joining Hudson Alpha as executive vice president for medical genomics and chief medical genomics officer. Congratulations, Howard, to your new position. And while not here at today's meeting but joining us later by phone, another transition. Council member Bob Nussbaum will be taking up a new position of chief medical officer of Invite, a genetic testing company in San Francisco. So congratulations to Bob as well. Now there are other transitions for giants in genomics that were announced recently. Ralph Oppweiler and Ewan Burney have been appointed joint directors of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute, or EMBEL EVI, as Janet Thornton steps down after 14 years in her leadership position. Ralph and Ewan will assume their roles in July of this year. The MIT technology review recently listed its top 10 breakthrough technologies for 2015. Of note is number 10, the Internet of DNA, a global network of millions of genomes. And then featured as an NHGRI genome advanced the month since the last council meeting have been publications describing the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool, research findings from the roadmap epigenomics project, and the genomics of Icelanders. And then for our genomics in the new segment of the director's report, we wanted to highlight three prominent pieces all coming from the New York Times. These include a very nice interview with Mary Claire King, an op-ed from Newt Gingrich calling for a doubling of NIH funding, and a piece by Eric Lander regarding forensic science. And of course we could have no director's report without learning about genomes in the news. And there's been a number of recently generated genome sequences reported since the last council meeting. It includes 15 species of Darwin's Finches, Eastern Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly, Hookworm, the Tibetan Plateau Frog, the large yellow croaker, for those who don't know that's actually a fish, a mountain gorilla, cotton species, liver fluke, two woolly mammoths, and both the European Buzz-tailed Bumblebee and the North American Common Eastern Bumblebee. These latter two advances created quite a buzz. That was a test to see if you were paying attention. You all passed the test. I purposely put it in. Good. Excellent. We can now move on to talk about the Extramural Research Program. All right. Starting with NHGRI's genome sequencing program, of course it currently has a number of funding opportunities at different stages of the application and review process. So just to sort of take stock of this, applications for the Centers for Common Disease Genomics or CCDGs and the Centers for Mendelian Genomics, CMGs, have been submitted and are in the process of being reviewed. An RFA for a genome sequencing program coordinating center was released on March 25th. The RFA number is given there. And then, meanwhile, funding opportunities for three remaining genome sequencing program concepts are still in progress and are being processed and will be released in the very near future. Recall that these will be for a genome sequencing program analysis centers, another for high quality gold reference genomes, and another for comparative genomics, as we discussed at the February Council meeting. Interesting development that's relevant to our current genome sequencing program is an announcement for something actually quite new. It's called the Gabriella Miller Kids First Pediatric Research Program, or simply referred to as Kids First. This new NIH Common Fund program is planning to develop a data resource for the pediatric research community of well-curated clinical and genomic sequence data. Now these data are intended to facilitate discovering the genomic basis of structural birth defects in childhood cancer. Now you might ask, why am I inserting this here when I'm talking about our genome sequencing program? It's a Common Fund project, but the reason is that the initial component of this program is providing access to whole genome sequencing for available samples with that sequencing to be provided by NHGRI Genome Sequencing Program. So an announcement about this opportunity for X01 awards for this program was released last Friday with a due date of July 27th, and the Common Fund will be providing all the funds to support genome sequencing of the samples identified through this announcement, and that sequencing will be carried out by participants in our genome sequencing program. Moving on to other components of our sequencing program, 1000 Genomes Project is winding down. Recall that the project's goal was to identify and catalog 95 percent of the common human genomic variants, those with a frequency of at least 1 percent. Indeed, the final data set appears to account for greater than 99 percent of the common variants, and this was based on the sequencing of genomes of about 2,500 people from 26 populations. In total, 1000 Genomes has found greater than 84 million variant sites in the human genome. These include 81 million single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs, 3.4 million insertion deletions, and 68,000 structural variants. And the project's final paper should be published by October of this year. Another project that is winding down is the Cancer Genome Atlas project, or TCGA that I mentioned earlier, which is a joint effort between NHGRI and NCI that aims to improve our understanding of the molecular basis of cancer. Well, TCGA is being recognized for its remarkable achievements, and specifically the TCGA team has been selected as a finalist for the 2015 Samuel J. Hyman Service to America Medal. Now, these prestigious awards, nicknamed the SAMIs, is presented annually by the non-profit, non-partisan Partnership for Public Service to celebrate excellence in federal civil service, sometimes as referred to as the Oscars for Government Service, and shown here are NCI's Jean-Claude Saint-Glusson and NHRI's Caroline Hutter, who lead a very successful and impressive team from both institutes that oversee the TCGA project. So congratulations to the whole team for being finalists for this prestigious award. The Centers for Mendelian Genomics, or CMGs, were launched three and a half years ago aiming to find as many causal genes of Mendelian conditions as possible. To date, CMGs have been responsible for discovering greater than 1,100 causal genes from Mendelian conditions, of which 453 are novel in that they have not been previously shown to be associated with any Mendelian conditions. Some of these discoveries have now been reported in over 170 publications. Besides making direct contributions to finding the causes of single gene disorders, the CMGs are playing a significant role in project matching in order to accelerate discoveries, specifically the Program Gene Matcher is a software that enables connections between investigators sharing an interest in the same candidate gene, or genes, and it's been used by a rapidly growing number of international investigators since its launch in December of 2013. And the graph shows that by April of this year, 201 matches had been made out of 1923 submitted genes. Another focus of the CMGs' attention is resource sharing in order to enable other investigators to conduct similar research. To name a few examples of these efforts, FinoDB is a tool for phenotype data entry and storage, and it's been downloaded by over 216 groups worldwide. The source code for ALOFT, a program for analysis of loss of function variants, is now freely available. And then two CMG workshops have now been held that provided participants with hands-on experience using CMG data and CMG data analysis tools. In addition, all the CMG groups deposit their sequence data now into DBGAP. The clinical sequence and exploratory research program, which you'll be hearing more about in the open session, is really focusing on the integration of genome sequencing into the clinical workflow, including the generation interpretation and clinical reporting of genomic information. CSER, as it's referred to, is now enrolled over 3,600 adults and almost 800 children as participants, nearly 3,000 of whom have had their germline genome sequence data generated, and over 500 who have had tumor genome sequence data generated. As one measure of overall impact, CSER has generated 149 publications, including 10 cross-CSER working group publications. CSER was prominently featured at both the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics annual meeting in March, and the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting in April. In total, there were 29 CSER-related talks at these two meetings, including a short course on clinical exome sequencing and a panel discussion on investigating the actionability of tumor genome variants. And as I mentioned earlier, you'll be hearing from Gal Jorvik and Les Piscic are later in the open session about the CSER program. Moving on to other prominent NHGRI programs, the goal of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements or ENCODE project is to create a catalog of all functional elements in the human and mouse genomes, and to make those catalogs available as a resource to the biomedical community. NHGRI held a small planning workshop entitled From Genome Function to Biomedical Insight, ENCODE and Beyond in March. The goal of the workshop was to obtain community input on possible future scientific directions in the area of genome function, following the current phase of ENCODE and starting in 2016. And later in the open session, you'll get a summary of that workshop followed by a presentation of concepts for four initiatives in functional genomics. Meanwhile, ENCODE has planted a community users meeting that will take place in late July or late June and early July in the DC area. The consortium will lead hands-on workshops on how to use ENCODE data and community members will make presentations on how they are using the data, and the registration website is now open for this. And meanwhile, ENCODE data continues to be heavily used. There are at least 1,018 community publications from groups without ENCODE funding that's are shown in the blue bars. In addition to that, ENCODE has published 452 consortium publications shown in the purple bars. The NHGRI genome-wide association studies or GWAS catalog is a curated, downloadable, user-friendly resource that catalogs the findings from published genome-wide association studies. It's produced as a collaboration among NHGRI, the European Bioinformatics Institute EBI, and the National Center for Biotechnology Information and CBI. We reported at the February council meeting that the GWAS catalog content and search interface were in the process of migrating to EBI, and now that transition is complete. So, announced with this GWAS cake shown here, designated to mark the occasion, the new EBI site features an enhanced search engine, an interface, and updated content. And for the time being, the existing NHGRI site will still be maintained with content prior to the transition. Investigators in the electronic medical records and genomics or eMERGE network, leverage data from large biorepositories linked to electronic medical records to conduct genomic discovery and clinical implementation research. In the final year of its second phase, the network is actively disseminating its products and best practices to the broader scientific community. The American Medical Informatics Association, AMIA, its 2015 joint summits on translational science were held in March, and eMERGE investigator Chunhua Wang led and organized this meeting as chair of the Clinical Research Informatics Scientific Program Committee. Now, eMERGE researchers shared their experiences in designing phenotype algorithms using clinical information stored in participants' electronic health records. They also fielded questions on implementing real-time clinical decision support for healthcare providers. And for this, they received a distinguished paper award for mapping institutional data to standard schema for representing clinical concepts and a student paper award for developing a phenotype algorithm for adverse drug reactions to staff. Another genomic medicine program, the Clinical Genome Resource, or ClinGen, designed to build an authoritative central research that defines the clinical relevance of genomic variants for use in precision medicine and research, is proceeding well and will become a key resource for our genomic medicine implementation efforts. Now, ClinGen investigators have developed a classification scheme to assess the clinical validity of specific gene disease pairs, such as SNMD3 for Lowy's Deed Syndrome or RAD51D for ovarian cancer. This is an important addition to our set of tools for interpreting the clinical relevance of genes and variants. An abbreviated version of the classification system is shown here, but the complete framework in supporting documentation can be reviewed on the ClinGen website. United by the common goals of leveraging data sharing and collaboration to improve our understanding of human genomic variation, ClinGen and the Sanger Institute's decipher group will co-host a large public meeting next week in Washington, DC. Meeting topics include approaches for curating gene disease relationships, lessons learned from aggregating population and patient data, and initiatives facilitating clinical genomics IT development. The Implementing Genomics in Practice or IGNITE Network aims to advance genomic medicine by developing methods for incorporating genomic information into clinical care in diverse clinical settings and populations. The network has submitted their marker paper describing six projects, the Coordinating Center and the network's working groups and activities for publication. The network is also accepting affiliate members to share strategies in overcoming genomic medicine implementation challenges and an increasing power for analyses of outcomes. Investigators such as Howard McLeod at the Moffitt Cancer Center, Julio Duarte at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and John Lima at Nemours Children's Health System have already joined as affiliates. And currently, the network and its affiliate members are collaborating to assess outcomes of CIP2C-19 testing to predict a pedigree response. Of note, Josh Denney and IGNITE PI was appointed a member of the advisory committee to the NIH Director of Working Group on the Precision Medicine Initiative. Another genomic medicine program, and the Newborn Sequencing and Genomic Medicine and Public Information and SITE program will explore in a limited but deliberate manner the implications, challenges, and opportunities associated with the possible use of genome sequencing and its information for the care of newborns. Recently, the four sites participated in Children's Mercy Pediatric Genomics Medicine Conference in Kansas City, at which key personnel from each of the sites discussed their progress to date. Video from the Associated Press Briefing and Interviews with the Insight presenters can be found on the Children's Mercy Hospitals Conference website. The NHGRI Genomic Medicine Working Group is a working group of this council and provides guidance to NHGRI in areas of genomic medicine implementation. As a follow-up to the 2014 Global Leaders in Genomic Medicine Meeting, the NIH and FDA sponsored a workshop on research directions in genetically mediated Stevens-Johnson syndrome, Toxid Epidermal Necrolysis, or SJS-10. This workshop brought together global experts on this disorder to discuss gaps and opportunities in basic research, clinical implementation, and pharmacosurveillance, and then discussed priorities for future research to globally eliminate genetically mediated Stevens-Johnson syndrome. The Genomic Medicine Working Group is now planning its next meeting, entitled Genomic Medicine Eight, NHGRI's Genomic Medicine Programs, which will be held in early June. The Genomic Medicine Eight meeting will convene leadership from NIH and external groups to examine NHGRI's Genomic Medicine portfolio in light of evolving scientific knowledge and opportunities. As with the previous Genomic Medicine gatherings, the meeting will be webcast or videocast live and also video archived on our Genome TV channel of YouTube. And staff from the Division of Genomic Medicine will then be given a more detailed update on both these meetings at the September Council meeting. Another working group of this council is the Genomic Medicine, I mean, the Genomics and Society Working Group. It's charged with providing advice on short and long-term planning and priority setting for genomics and society activities at the Institute. The Genomics and Society Working Group held its annual in-person meeting in April. Topics of discussion included the definition and rationale for continued support of normative and conceptual research within the LC Research Program, the appropriate balance between investigator-initiated and program-initiated activities within the LC Research Program's portfolio, including the role of embedded models for the conduct of LC research, the appropriate role of LC research program in the area of health services research, and LC research issues raised by the Precision Medicine Initiative. The working group chair, Lisa Parker, will also be provided an update about this working group at the September Council meeting. Since the February meeting of this group of the council, there's been a number of activities associated with the Centers of Excellence in LC Research or SEER program. The first regional SEER networking meeting for trainees and investigators was held in late February. The purpose of this workshop was to provide a more sustained training and networking experience for trainees associated with SEERS in the western half of the country, many of whom are unable to travel to the annual meeting on the east coast. Then the annual SEER investigator meeting was held in March. Highlights of this meeting included a grant writing workshop for SEER trainees, discussion of successes and challenges, in transdisciplinary research, and an overview of the very variety of stakeholder engagement activities across the SEERS. Our request for applications for the next round of SEERS was recently released. Applications are due July 15. Individuals interested in applying are strongly encouraged to contact LC Research program staff prior to submitting an application. Finally, for our extramural program, we at NHGRI have long supported genomics resources, such as databases, and recognize their critical role in enabling broad use of genomic data, particularly in the current funding climate. The long term sustainability of these resources is a very important topic for the institute. So NHGRI will take key steps toward developing a strategic vision for NHGRI funded genomics resources in a meeting that's actually going to be held later this week. The goal of the meeting is to develop a strategic vision for NHGRI funded large genomics resources. Attendees will include the PIs and a handful of advisors associated with NHGRI funded genomics resources, such as the model organism databases for fly, mouse, worm, yeast, zebrafish, ClinGen, the GO consortium, and Uniprot. Council members Joe Ecker and Carol Bolt will be among those participating. In addition, NIH staff from NHGRI, NIGMS, and the associate director for data science office will be attending. Key topics to be discussed during the workshop include measuring and improving efficiency in data curation, outreach, and training, understanding user needs and the impact of these resources on biomedical research, and ensuring appropriate long term sustainability for the operations and services that these resources support. Okay, moving on to common fund and trans-NIH initiatives. Starting with human microbiome efforts, as a reminder, the Intercative HMP, or I-HMP program is made up of three research projects and a data coordination center. The longitudinal research projects are studying onset of inflammatory bowel disease, type two diabetes, and preterm birth, with the goal of integrating multi-omic data from the study subjects and their microbiomes. In January, the common fund provided full support for the I-HMP data coordination center, and in March, this center met with the project data managers to develop data harmonization and deposition protocols for these multi-omic data. The second annual I-HMP consortium meeting will be held in June, and then the fifth international human microbiome consortium congress was held in March in Luxembourg and was very well attended by about 500 researchers from 15 countries, representing five continents, and the sixth such congress is planned for October in Houston. Now, a fast-track action committee on mapping the microbiome was recently chartered by the president's Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP, to analyze the US federal government's investment in microbiome research. The committee is co-chaired by the Department of Health and Human Services, USDA, and OSTP. Lita Proctor from NHRI is serving as the committee's executive secretary. The committee initiated a data call to analyze the federal microbiome research portfolio over the fiscal years 2012 to 2014. The analysis includes 11 departments and agencies and will include research support for both host and ecosystem-associated microbiomes. The report back to OSTP is intended to identify the gaps, the needs, the challenges as determined by the portfolio analysis for advancing this field forward, and the report will also outline a federal coordinated plan to support the president's fiscal year 2017 budget request, how it might contain requests for funds for microbiome research. Another common fund project, now the Genotype Tissue Expression Project, or G-TEX, is an NIH common fund project that aims to provide a comprehensive gene expression atlas across multiple human tissues and comprehensive cis and trans EQTL results for each tissue. These data should provide insights into the mechanisms of gene regulation and aid in the interpretation of many studies, including genome-wide association studies. For creation of this atlas, G-TEX has collected and analyzed biospecimens from over 800 donors so far, and it's projected that donor recruitment will reach its goal of 900 by the end of this summer. A couple of weeks ago, a major paper describing the results of G-TEX was published in Science, along with two companion papers on multi-tissue transcriptomics and predicted protein truncated variants. The human heredity and health in Africa or H3Africa has a central goal of developing a sustainable and collaborative African genetics and genomics research enterprise. Last week, some of us, including me, attended the sixth H3Africa Consortium meeting in Livingstone, Zambia. In addition to normal consortium reporting and discussions, there was an NIH grants management workshop, a community engagement training workshop, and the second ethics consultation meeting, which included 44 research ethics committee members from 17 different African countries. I should just sort of pause and say I was really quite impressed with the progress being made by the H3Africa Consortium. In really just a few short years, I've witnessed impressive growth in not only the quality of the science, but also the vibrancy of H3Africa's collective research community and the energy and the enthusiasm of the trainees and, in general, the spirit of collaboration that really wasn't there on day one, which absolutely is there now. I think all of us, actually, including this council, should feel sort of a shared sense of pride in getting this important global initiative off the ground and thriving in a relatively short period of time. Now, recently, we had seen indications that H3Africa ethics working group activities are having an impact on national policies. For example, H3Africa's informed consent guidelines were cited in the 2015 South Africa National Ethics Guidelines as a model for genomics. Also in the realm of bioethics, an additional three ELSI awards have been made, two focusing on the ethics of biobanking and bioresources, and one examining stigma in genomics research. And finally, there's some interesting new development for research in Africa, something called the Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Science in Africa, or AESA, has received seed money from the Welcome Trust, the UK Department for International Development, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And this is a platform for managing Africa-focused research programs and also a think tank to direct the continent science. And we are already exploring ways that H3Africa and this new organization might interact in a productive way. Well, moving beyond the Common Fund, the February meeting of this council came shortly after President Obama announced the new Precision Medicine Initiative, first in his State of the Union address on January 20th, and then more extensively in a formal event at the White House on January 28th. Now, council has asked to be kept informed about this initiative, and so I plan to regularly incorporate such updates into my director's report from this point forward. Well, immediately following the February council meeting was the first in what will be a series of initial planning workshops for the Precision Medicine Initiative. This meeting, held in mid-February, focused on designing the proposed one million volunteer U.S. national cohort and gathering at this meeting aimed to both lay out the broad set of immediate issues that need to be faced and to begin compiling the many details that will need to be worked out. And shown here are the group of roughly 90 participants at this workshop, but I should point out that there was incredible interest on the outside and we video cast this live and had over 1,700 remote viewers participating in the workshop. Now, several weeks later, Francis Collins announced the establishment of a working group of his advisory committee to the director that will focus on the Precision Medicine Initiative with a particular emphasis on the national research cohort component. That group is co-chaired by Rick Lifton, an HRI grantee and someone well-known to this council, Bray Patrick Lake of Duke University and NIH Deputy Director Kathy Hudson. The other members of the working group are listed here and together they bring strong and diverse expertise to the group, but in particularly, I wanna make a shout out and point out that also on this working group is included a council member, Jay Shendori. We thank Jay for extra work and an advisory way to help out on this working group of Francis as well as this council. Now, the activities of this working group headline the immediate next steps for the planning of the Precision Medicine Initiative. This group, this new working group is in the midst of a very intense planning phase which will be carried out in particular over the next three to four months. This is needed so that they can deliver an interim report in the early fall and to accomplish this, a series of strategic workshops is being held essentially monthly. The February workshop that I mentioned earlier was then followed by another workshop directly involving the working group last month and there are now three more workshops being held on behalf of the working group that will take place over the summer including one later this month. Now, these steps are all oriented towards the development of strategic plan for the Precision Medicine Initiative but what about the actual implementation of that plan? Well, currently what is envisioned is that NIH will implement the Precision Medicine Initiative using a trans-NIH implementation model generally analogous to common fund projects and the big data to knowledge or BD2K initiative. Well, along with Gary Gibbons who's the director of the National Heart, London Blood Institute, I am now co-chairing an implementation group consisting of about 16 other institute and center directors. Our immediate role is to implement the strategic vision for the national research cohort. This will involve work over the summer so as to announce the initial set of funding opportunities in the early fall. This timing is necessary because assuming funds are provided, the Precision Medicine Initiative will begin next fiscal year. Needless to say, this represents a very tight timeline and keep in mind that most of this heavy lifting for the initiative is being done by NIH but we also need to be carefully coordinating what we're doing with multiple other government agencies. So very, very busy time. And as you might imagine, with such rapid planning and implementation process, many things are happening in parallel. And consuming a significant amount of attention is information gathering about many aspects of building this national research cohort. So for example, to inform the workshop that is happening at the end of this month, NIH recently issued this request for information or RFI about existing research cohorts. This RFI is actually already closed, on May 7th, but it did have a very vigorous response. I can tell you that additional RFIs are already being planned as there remains a considerable number of questions for which NIH could use additional information from the research community. So be on a lookout for future RFIs. I wanna also point out that, and perhaps it's not surprising, NHGRI staff is being called down to provide a substantial amount of help in standing up the Precision Medicine Initiative. There have been multiple teams established to pursue more detailed analysis and planning in specific areas, and these are often aligned with one or more of the upcoming workshops. Well, in addition to my co-chairing responsibilities of the parent group for implementing, NHGRI senior staff are co-chairing three of the five area-specific teams, specifically that's Terry Minolio, Laura Rodriguez, and Ben Spahnem, are all major co-chairing responsibilities, as well as other NHGRI staff being pulled in many different directions to help gather information, handle logistical things, and help sort of deal with many, many details. So at the end of the day, I fully expect NHGRI to be heavily invested in many aspects of the Precision Medicine Initiative, both in its planning, which we're doing now, but I also think ultimately in its execution. But I can't possibly summarize all of this fast-moving developments with the initiative in my director's report, and you might not wanna wait to the next council meeting to learn about the latest developments because a lot's gonna happen between now and September. But the good news is that all of us at NIH are trying to make the strategic planning and implementation process for the initiative as transparent as possible. And I would just point you to this website in particular. We're largely providing that transparency through the web, starting with this dedicated landing page for the initiative with a very simple URL, www.nih.gov, backslash, Precision Medicine. All sorts of information is being gathered on this site, and it's the aim to continue to organize all material for the initiative around this particular site. So for example, these workshops that are being held, if you click on right there where it says events, that will take you to a bigger page that lists all the workshops that either have been held in the past or are coming up in the future, so you'll know when to look out for workshops or will know when video archives of workshops are available. And then if you click down on a past event, for example, you'll get to a page like this where you will find all sorts of materials, such as actual links to the video cast themselves, agendas, biographies, eventually meeting reports will be put up there. In many cases, the PowerPoint presentations are put up and so forth. So I would just encourage all of you to monitor these web pages, especially over the summer if you're interested, because a lot's gonna happen between council meetings. But I will certainly give an update on the major highlights at the September council meeting. One last thing about the Precision Medicine Initiative, I thought I would mention. I thought you'd be interested, it caught my eye certainly, and some of you may be aware of this as well, that several weeks after the public announcement of the Precision Medicine Initiative and in conjunction with the announcements about the new Apple Watches, Apple announced the release of something called Research Kit, which is an open source software framework that facilitates the creation of apps for medical research studies. Now, the notion of using apps for participant recruitment and data collection, for example, using mobile health devices, represents an integral aspect of the vision for the Precision Medicine Initiative. And Apple also announced the release of an initial set of apps specifically for participating in small number of disease-specific research projects. And apparently a large number of volunteers were, as a result, recruited to these studies very quickly. So I just mentioned Apple's Research Kit because I think it illustrates the likely commercial interests and potentially public-private partnerships related to some very important elements of the Precision Medicine Initiative. And so this is something that I think all of us are gonna wanna monitor as things progress. Okay, moving beyond Common Fund Transit, IH back to the Institute in particular, our Division of Policy Communications and Education. Many activities going on here, starting with the Inner Society Coordinating Committee for Practitioner Education in Genomics, or ISCC, continues its work to improve the genomic literacy of healthcare practitioners and enhance the practice of genomic medicine. As I mentioned at the last council meeting, NHGRI's Genomic Healthcare Branch Chief Bob Wilden assumed the role of NHGRI co-chair this past winter. And this spring, Ann Cardy, Medical Director of the Division of Continuing Medical Education of the American Academy of Family Physicians has become the external co-chair. Ann relieves Mike Murray of Geisinger Medical Center and member of the American College of Physicians who served in the role since ISCC's inception. Later this week, the ISCC will hold its fourth in-person meeting. The invited speakers will discuss patient safety and genomic medicine, genetic counselors role in education, point of care, education modes, and the interprofessional education collaborative called the IPEC. In addition, breakout groups will discuss other important topics, including next steps for healthcare professional education and funding priorities. In March, legislation was introduced in Congress that if passed into law would weaken the protections afforded by the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act, or GINA. The Preserving Employee Wellness Programs Act introduced by Senator Alexander of Tennessee in the Senate and by Representative Klein of Minnesota in the House of Representatives would remove GINA's protection with respect to workplace wellness programs that include financial incentives and penalties. It would, for instance, allow employers to increase health insurance premiums for employees who choose not to participate in employee-sponsored wellness programs in order to keep their genetic information private and avoid it being shared with their employers. Currently, while GINA permits employers to ask employees questions about their genetic information in the context of wellness program, it also says that answering such questions is entirely voluntary and that an employer may not penalize employees who choose not to answer such questions. Well, NHGRI is monitoring the progress of this legislation closely. In related news, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last month issued draft regulations on what constitutes a voluntary workplace wellness program and NHGRI is examining the potential impact of the regulation on GINA and research participants. As counsel is aware, over the past year, NHGRI has been in discussions with the FDA on a range of topics related to the regulation of genomics research and genomics-based clinical tests. Tests. One such topic has been the applicability of FDA's investigational device exemption, or IDE, regulations to genomics research, including some of our NHGRI-supported programs. In order to help the research community understand and navigate these regulations, NHGRI has consulted with the FDA to develop a number of new resources on our website, genome.gov. Last month, the policy and program analysis branch launched new pages within the issues and genetics section of genome.gov, including plain language guide for researchers that explains when the regulations might apply to their genomic medicine studies, as well as a series of case studies to explore how the regulations might apply to different research scenarios. NHGRI staff will continue to develop case studies as more examples are explored with the FDA so that we can provide a dynamic resource to the community that expands what's our collective learning. I, along with 14 intramural trainees from NHGRI, are contributing to a project that some of you might be interested in called Lab TV, which is a website of many documentaries about scientists who are passionate about their work. Its primary goal is to inspire students to think about a research career. In each video, the interviewee answers questions such as where did I come from, what inspired me to become a scientist, what challenges did I overcome to achieve my present role, why am I excited to be working on my projects, and what are my hopes and dreams for the future, et cetera. Once they're edited, all the videos will be posted on the Lab TV website and then reposted on genome.gov. Now, this project is the brainchild of Jay Walker, who is the curator and chairman of TEDMED, an annual conference focusing on health and medicine. In many of the videos, including my interview, are being shot by David Hoffman, who's an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker. In 2012, I launched a new initiative to capture and preserve NHGRI's historic role in the Human Genome Project and its subsequent genomics programs. And as part of these efforts, NHGRI recently held a two-day workshop entitled Capturing the History of Genomics. About 40 participants, including scholars, NIH staff, and past and present NHGRI staff, met to discuss the plans for the initiative among the attendees was Council Member Jim Evans. Thank you, Jim, for joining us for that. The external scholars of history, philosophy, technology, and ethics were invited to give talks on their areas of interest. Presentations included the History of the Human Genome Project, human genomic variation research, genomics data sharing, and development of bioinformatics databases. Participants provided feedback about NHGRI's efforts to develop an archival database to conduct oral history interviews and to produce scholarly work. And a special issue of the Journal of the History of Biology on the Historic Legacy of the Human Genome Project and Genomics is expected to be published based on the presentations at this meeting. Moving on to NHGRI's Smithsonian Exhibition, Genome Unlocking Life's Code, it is now on the road in traveling across North America. The exhibition made its first stop in San Diego at the Rubin H. Fleet Science Center and then headed north to San Jose in early January, where it was on display at the Tech Museum of Innovation through mid-April. Well, to support the exhibition's outreach and public programming while in San Jose, NHGRI partnered with the Life Sciences Foundation, Pacific Biosciences, and the Tech Museum to host an evening program called Big Data Genomics and Precision Medicine. The program featured San Francisco Bay Area Genomic research leaders from both the private and public sectors. To start the program, I provided an overview of Precision Medicine and then moderated three conversations, featuring David Housler and Mike Hunkapiller, Council Member Carlos Bustamante and Neil Rich, and Mildred Cho and Anne Wajiski. More than 150 people attended the program, but a video archive of the evening and the entire event is available via link on the exhibition's website, unlockinglifescode.org. Also, during the exhibition's time in San Jose, the Tech Museum hosted an epic genetics day in April, which was oriented for families. Attendees had the opportunity to participate in hands-on activities within the exhibition that explored and explained how DNA works. The day also featured a presentation about dog genomics from Elaine Ostrander from NHGRI's Intramural Research Program. Now, for the next three years or so, the Genome Unlocking Lives Code exhibition will make several stops around the country. Currently, the exhibition actually just arrived in my hometown of St. Louis at the St. Louis Science Center. And NHGRI is sponsoring several programs for the public, high school students and healthcare professionals in partnership with the St. Louis Science Center, local organizations, NHGRI grantees, and the Academy of Science of St. Louis, as well as nearby institutions. So, please continue to check the UnlockingLivesCode.org website and follow us on social media for the most up-to-date program information that'll be taking place in St. Louis and elsewhere. But following its day in St. Louis, it moves back over to the West Coast where it will be in Oregon. And then beginning in 2016, it'll find its way to Milwaukee. And we thought Howard was gonna help us and now we'll have to help us find people who will help us develop programming around its day in Milwaukee. One of the ways that we engage with museum visitors in the genome exhibition is by providing different types of interactive learning experiences, mainly through the use of computer monitors and kiosks. This interactive experience provides an opportunity for visitors to think about and discuss their views on complex topics, such as ancestry, ethical, legal, and social issues and decision-making within their families. Over the past few months, our exhibition team has been converting these interactive experiences for use online. And in celebration of DNA Day, the exhibition interactive What Do You Think was made available on the unlockinglivescode.org website as an online tool, bringing this popular exhibition activity into homes and classrooms. In the web mobile version, a short introductory video was played and then visitors explored the ethical and social connections to genomics, answering thought-provoking questions about society, privacy, health, discrimination, research, identity, and children. And once the user completes their series of questions related to those topics, they can see how their responses compare to other respondents in real time. And the next interactive schedule to be made available online is In and Beyond Africa, which looks at ancestry and how human populations originated. Another way that we're bringing the content of the exhibition to a wider audience is through the creation of inquiry-based lesson plans inspired by the exhibition. And in April, the first of a series of these lessons plans were made available to educators and the public. The first lesson focuses on genomics and human identity and was developed by NHGRI's Education and Community Involvement Branch with support from Promega Corporation. This resource was created in collaboration with educator, scientists, teachers, and students, nationwide, and guides a middle school and high school students through a learning experience that emphasizes collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data on population traits and genomic variants. It also is designed to raise awareness about career opportunities in genomics. And again, the lesson plan can be found on the UnlockingLightsCode.org website. Finally, each year, NHGRI celebrates National DNA Day. This year, our celebration was officially observed on April 24th. Activities to engage educator students and the public were held throughout the month of April, and as always, were organized by our Education and Community Involvement Branch. NHGRI took advantage of the power of social media and hosted our first ever DNA pin interest challenge for K through 12 teachers and their students. Teachers were challenged to create these boards on the topic of genomics that could be used as a teaching resources in the classroom. And the top 10 boards were selected can now be viewed on a dedicated page, again at the exhibition's website UnlockingLightsCode.org. In addition to social media effort, institute staff provided public tours of several NHGRI research labs, participated in activities hosted by local non-profit educational organizations, and organized the NHGRI ambassadors program, which sent genetic counseling students, trainees, and scientists to local schools to participate in classroom activities. And our own Larry Brody, shown here, director of NHGRI's Division of Genomics and Society, gave a special presentation in the Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. And finally, I'll say just a few things about ongoings in our intramural research program. This was particularly special. On March 10th, one of the Maryland senators, Senator Ben Cardin, took to the floor of the United States Senate to applaud the work of Bill Gall and the NIH Undiagnosed Disease Program, UDP. He spoke for several minutes about the dedication and hard work exhibited by Bill, who's the institute's clinical director and his UDP team in their pursuit of some of the most challenging medical mysteries, highlighting the impact for patients and conditions that have long eluded diagnoses. During his visit to NIH last month, Senator Cardin then subsequently met with Bill to thank him personally for his service and his effort. Another honor, Julie Segre, whose chief and senior investigator in the translational and functional genomics branch has been elected as a fellow in the American Academy of Microbiology. She is one of 79 microbiologists to be elected in 2015. And highlights from the NACRI Intramural Research Program since the last council meeting include Elaine Ostrander and her colleagues found that BRAF mutation in 80% of canine bladder cancers is homologous to human mutations found in about 8% of human bladder cancers. This finding suggests that dogs offer a new model for assessing the effectiveness of drugs designed to combat BRAF-associated cancer. It's an article that appeared in molecular cancer research. Meanwhile, a team led by Susan Persky published a study that explored the influence of family health history-based obesity risk feedback on overweight female participants measuring for lifestyle versus genetic guilt that obesity might affect their children. Their study was published in the Journal of Health Psychology. And Sean Burgess and colleagues have developed a transgenic zebrafish as a live animal model for metastasis, offering cancer research with a new potentially more accurate way to screen for drugs to identify new targets against the disease. This article of theirs was published in disease models and mechanisms. And then before ending my director's report, I'd wanna put a plug-in for those interested who wish to wanna receive my monthly email update called the Genomics Landscape can simply go to this URL, or to go to this site and register to receive it. And then, finally, a personal thanks, as always, to all the people who have helped put this together, almost all the staff's involved in some way. And then, of course, we have our IT team and web team and communications group making sure all this is transmitted electronically, put up on the web, and archived forever. And, of course, the ringleader of all this, as always, is Chris Wetterstrand, well, he couldn't pull this all together without her help. But before I end, I wanted to share one more thing with you. So I started something new at last director's report where I said a day in the life of the NHGRI director. And I just thought I'd give you a slice of sometimes the craziness that happens in this job. Sometimes fun, sometimes not so fun. I'll try to share the fun ones with you, especially the ones that make me laugh. So recall last time I introduced this and I talked about how the White House wanted my model of my double helix put next to the present. And that totally disrupted my morning. I was crazy unexpected. A similar thing happened, I just, that made me chuckle I wanted to share with you. I got a lot of really weird mail, Harold Hamill. And it was made out to a slightly weird address, not exactly the precise one for me, but it found its way to me and I opened this up and there was a letter, it was hard to read, you can't possibly read it. I had a stare over for a while. But this is what the letter said. Said, dear Eric, I am a big fan of yours. By the way, I rarely get mail that starts, I am a big fan of yours. So I thought this was great, this is gonna make my day. But the next line said, having you seen you play in person in the 90s did your entire NFL football career. I thought maybe the person was confused because I did play touch football in middle school. I thought maybe. That's what they were referring to. But I quickly found out that it wasn't me. He said, I found these two cards of you and I hope you would kindly personally autograph both cards for me. And this is what he said. No, this didn't come as a complete surprise because actually I know for a fact that if you just Google Eric Green straight out, this is the dude you get, okay? You gotta put in genomics, genetics, and I ate something if you're gonna try to find me. But I knew about the other Eric Green. He has a lot of talents. He played in the NFL for 10 years. Me, two Pro Bowls, played from 1990 to 1999. But nonetheless, I mean, I feel bad for Harold. I think, you know, Harold Hamill. I mean, it was an understandable mistake. I mean, oh, by the way, he then said, thanks for all the memories, a loyal fan. And he's been a Steeler fan since 1961, which is remarkable in and of itself. But it's an, I couldn't be a Steeler fan that long. But it's an understandable mistake. I mean, there's really a lot of similarities. It really are. We both have the same name, right? I mean, we're both sort of that middle age kind of thing. We're reasonably close in height. I mean, but then in striking distance, okay. And we're only off by 121 pounds, so that made my day. Now, since then I've struggled and I'm actually seeking counsel's advice on what to do. Because I have these cards and he wants them autographed. And I didn't show up, he even sent a return envelope with a stamp on it to send back to him. But I feel like if I autographed them, that would be a little disingenuous. But I don't know how to reach the other Eric Green. So if there's any Pittsburgh Steeler fans out there that have connections to the team, or know this, and that includes out on the web, and people watching, please send me any information you have. I will happily try to get the cards in the hand of the famous Eric Green and get him to autograph it so that Harold can get his autographed cards as a long-term Steeler fan. So in any case, I couldn't make this stuff up. It really did happen. And why this gentleman thinks that an ex-football player works at NIH is beyond me, but nonetheless, it made me chuckle that day so I want to share it with you. And with that, I will draw to a close my director's report. Turn it back over to Rudy. Any questions for Eric of the director's report other than his football exploits?