 Okay, welcome back everyone, we're ready to resume with the open session of the advisory council meeting. We have five concepts to present to you this afternoon. Two of them are directly related to diversity workforce issues. And we thought it would be appropriate to have events bottom give you a presentation in advance of those concepts. A year ago Eric formed charged events with the responsibility to form a working group directly to address the issue of workforce diversity in the broadest sense possible. And so the first two concepts that we have for you this afternoon are kind of the leading edge or an initial products of the working group that Vince has formed. I should say events as a member of the internal research community. He is also a senior advisor to Eric Green. So events before you start your presentation, I'm going to invite Eric. Is there anything else you would like to add about your charge to events. Yeah, thank you. Thank you Rudy I did just want to say a couple things to contextualize not only events is presentation but then the two concepts that will follow is that it was striking during the entire two plus year strategic planning process, how many times and how frequently issues of diversity and equity and health disparities would come up. So even at an early stage when we started to synthesize the input we absolutely knew this was going to be featured in multiple parts of the ultimate strategic vision that was published. And so with that in mind, I turned to my senior advisor in genomics and health disparities that spot him and just basically said, get a running start. Let's not wait for the strategic vision to be published and then start active. This is one of these examples we should get a running start. And so Benz will tell you the details of the group you put together internally but this is what you are seeing basically now is the is some of the first products of this internal group that really had spent the last phase of the strategic planning process already started to thinking about implementation of we think is among the most important areas in the new strategic vision. And so it is not a coincidence that literally the first things we came out with publicly after the late October publication of our strategic vision in terms of specifics about how we're implementing elements of the strategic vision. It is around workforce diversity. And as you will see in his pencil say we sort of had we had it teed up so that when the new calendar year started literally the first week of January, we came out with some of the things that Benz is going to describe. And all this was very deliberately choreographed and I really want to emphasize reflects the commitment of the Institute to move the needle really try to think through with help of Council and other advisors to the Institute, what we could be doing in areas of diversity, equity, health disparities and so forth and this is going to focus on is specifically in the area today is going to focus on workforce diversity. So with that I'll turn this over to that. Okay, great. So thank you Eric and I am so pleased Council to be able to share with you this afternoon, the new NHGRI action agenda for genomics workforce diversity. So, Eric discussed in his director's report, the 2020 NHGRI strategic vision, and as Eric just articulated, as you review that strategic vision you see very clearly in a number of areas, the importance of diversity, both diversity with regards to ancestral populations and research, but also the importance of diversity with regards to the workforce and that our Institute has a responsibility to help to lead those efforts. This vision is highlighted several important areas of guiding principles and values foundational areas for genomics areas to break down barriers and compelling genomics research projects. One of the major themes is the issue of increasing diversity in the genomic workforce. And this is highlighted in several areas. One is in the guiding principles and values. And here with regards to the guiding principles and values, we have nine guiding principles and values as part of the strategic vision. And one of them is clearly focused on how do we think about and what is the role with regards to strategic vision for increasing diversity. So the one guiding principle and value is the need to champion genomics workforce. And this principle is clearly articulated in this value as the promise of genomics cannot fully be achieved without attracting, developing, retaining a diverse workforce, which includes individuals from groups that are currently underrepresented in the genomic enterprise. And we really explore this issue with regards to the efforts about thinking about diversity in a very broad way, but the needs to increase the diversity within the workforce. This is not the only area as guiding principles but robust foundational establishment of our work as an institute. So we do not see this just as an aspirational guiding principle and value, but a foundation for NHGRI. We provide sustaining and improving a robust foundation to foster a diverse workforce as a vital area for NHGRI over the next 10 years. And so if you look at this box here and you look at the variety of areas and the highlighting of training and training of a diverse area as an important part for our institute. As Eric stated, in December of 2019 he asked me to chair this NHGRI committee to develop the plan and to increase the diversity of the workforce. And I'm pleased that we presented this to the genomics community in January of this year. This included the publishing of our action agenda, but also a commentary that was published in American Journal of Human Genetics. And I refer both of them to you. I believe that they are in your council members package of documents to review. And to the broader community I refer the action agenda to you. You see here the website on genome.gov, as well as the American Journal of Human Genetics commentary, the reference to this commentary. So what are the goals? The action agenda sets forth four goals for NHGRI's efforts. The first goal is to develop and support initiatives that provide early exposure and access to careers in genomics. So we recognize that we can't start once an individual is in a graduate program. We must go back and look at K-12 and our efforts and activities of what we can do within middle schools and high schools to help to make students aware of genetics and genomics as a potential career area. And to highlight how do we expose the general public to careers in genomics. So there is a recognition of the early pathway or pipeline responsibilities for the institute. The second goal is to develop and support training programs and networks that connect undergraduate and graduate education to careers in genomics. And this will get highlighted today by Dr. Gatlin and her discussions of one of the concepts. But this issue of this importance with regards to what happens within undergraduate education and really exposing those students that are excited about science to careers in genetics and genomics. What can we do to help facilitate them moving from undergraduate to graduate school and then ultimately to careers. So building this network and this connection between undergraduate and graduate education is important in our ability to move forward with the workforce. The third goal is to develop and support training career development and research transition programs that lead to independent research and clinical careers in genomics. And here we really are highlighting on that ability to once an individual is completed their postdoc their their training within the field. How do we get them to independent careers. And I want to just highlight for you that we are talking about both research careers and clinical careers. We recognize that not everyone is going to be a researcher, but that we are going to need clinicians who are exposed and prepared for the fields of genetics and genomics to be prepared to work within various types of clinical settings. And so what can we do as an institute to help to move that forward in a way to have a much more diverse a population of individuals within clinical careers. At the working group highlighted this as a significant problem as we looked at clinical geneticists across the country and the lack of diversity within the field, as well as in the field of genetic counseling. And then finally to evaluate progress toward achieving greater diversity that we must evaluate our efforts as we go through this process of this action agenda to make sure that we are meeting our targets make changes as appropriate. So that we are not just waiting to 10 years from now down the road to see what we did. So this is an ongoing process of evaluating our efforts and activities with this action agenda. So I want to highlight here, the working group members that put in bi-weekly meetings that we had over a nine month period to prepare this action agenda. These individuals are from all areas of the Institute including our intramural program, extramural program directors and our office of director and I just want to acknowledge and thank them for their hard work and their important work to getting us to the stage that we're at today. And so this is just the beginning. And as you hear the two concepts that are presented today. And as we move forward. We will be coming back to you on a regular basis to update you on things that are happening with this action agenda as we extend the action agenda to efforts in our intramural program and our office of director. We will bring that back to you to let you know what is going on. But I want to highlight that one key component of this action agenda is partnership with other organizations. We're already partnering with three professional societies, the American Society of Human Genetics, the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics and the National Society of Genetic Counselors, as they are leading a survey to better understand the landscape of the genetics and genomics workforce today. And working with them in collaboration, we will also be working with other professional societies and industry, and with academic institutions. It's going to take all of us working together to actually make the kind of change that we hope to make. So with that, I'll take any questions, and then give it over to my colleagues. Thank you, Vince. Council members. Any questions for Vince? I don't see any hands up. So we're going to have Ford. Oh, Sharon. Sharon, you're on mute. My mute button is buried. Thanks so much and thanks for all the efforts. I did have a question about the pipeline issues and I can speak more from issues related to women in academics where people often comment on the pipeline but in fact women have been more than 50% of biology and medical school MDs, PhDs and MDs for I think it's 30 years or something. And so I do wonder sort of how do you balance the pipeline versus people leaving or being discriminated against as they sort of move forward with regard to your plan. Yeah, so one of the areas that we highlighted in the action agenda is that we need to focus on what can we do to help to increase the number of women and senior leadership positions within the field of genetics and genomics, where there clearly is a lack of women when you think about senior positions. And so we will target our efforts and activities on those areas where to one where we think we can make the most difference and to where there's clearly a lack of diversity so taking your comment and consideration, you know, we will target our areas around senior leadership around issues with women. Yeah, no, I'm sorry just to be clear, I wasn't really talking about women. I was just saying the experience with trying to bring women into the workforce is that the pipeline is not enough. And so I think when you look at African Americans, Hispanic other other individuals that are underrepresented there's also as a tendency to blame the pipeline. And I just want to make sure you're sort of encompassing the fact that the pipeline itself is not enough. Now I totally agree with you and the broader issue of culture is a part of this, you know, development of this action agenda is how can we make the community much more inclusive and welcoming of individuals from diverse background so you know, one of the things that's clear is there's a lot of individuals who are really excited about the field, but don't don't always get the opportunities and so what can we do as an institute working with our partners, including, you know, investigators to help to create a culture that's much more inclusive. Okay I've got Olga and then how. Go ahead Olga. I'm delighted to that I'm wondering if you're thinking at all about also looking at additional barriers like for women, for example childcare right where you know women are traveling a lot less because they're in child, you know, they need to be at home so then obviously they're going to rise. I have a feeling this is not based on data but based on the anecdotal evidence that for a lot of minority, especially for generation situations right like they're maybe helping care for aging parents maybe similar things regardless of gender as well. And so, are you at all thinking about basically reducing these sort of barriers in addition to all the other issues. So we're thinking broadly and trying to capture and learn from other institutes and empirical work that NIH has initiated and funded about some of the challenges and clearly. The challenge that's been highlighted with regards to the current pandemic we're in, and the impact is having. So, as we go forward, we need to think about different strategies for different target populations and different stages of an individual's career so I recognize that you know clearly the pandemic is identifying that so this is clearly in the broader scope of how we work with professional societies and organizations and going forward that something we should be aware of. And thank you for all your work on this. Right, thank you. How go ahead. Yes, fence. Thank you for your important work in this area to build upon comments by Sharon and Olga. I'm wondering if there's any effort to identify minority individuals who have entered our pipeline, but then who have gotten lost along the path to a sustained career in genomics and genetics. If we were able to identify them and engage them we might learn more about where this is failing many individuals. We have a great point as part of our development of the action agenda. We had an opportunity to do focus groups with early stage individuals within the field, and we heard some really important themes from those individuals that have gotten incorporated in the action agenda but will be part of our work going forward. I also think and identify clinical medical geneticists. We tried to identify individuals who are from certain backgrounds across the country so that we can have focus groups and have conversations with them to learn about how to be successful in their path in reaching their careers and what kind of barriers they have had. So our ability to continuously listen and to to learn how we can modify our action agenda highlight areas and opportunities by engaging with those that are in the field, and those that have moved on to other areas will be extremely important. So last call for questions for Vince. So, I look forward to coming back to update you on the action agenda. And I know my colleagues will now present two concepts. Thank you.