 Okay, thank you, Rudy. For those of you who are joining us remotely through our live video cast, I want to personally welcome you and encourage you to follow along all the documents relevant for the speakers you'll be hearing from or available on our website and you'll hear from a number of people today that you might want to look at the additional materials that are available. In terms of my directors report, if you're new to council meetings, I want to make you aware there's a specific electronic resource that's been developed for my directors report that's analogous to a supplementary materials section of a published paper. You can access that resource at the URL shown on the bottom of the slide. Also, all of these slides that I'll be showing are available to you electronically either in PDF or PowerPoint formats and then when there's a particular document or relevant website for a particular slide being shown you will see a document number on the bottom right of that slide and that document number references those materials that can be accessed or downloaded from the website shown here. And then in addition to the video archive, this web page and all the link documents will be archived permanently on genome.gov as a historic record of this council meeting. Now today in the open session there's going to be several other presentations and my directors report this tailored around these presentations so I'm not going to discuss in any great detail the topics that others are going to cover. This particular meeting we're fortunate to have two relatively new institute directors who will be joining us today and making presentations to the council. Immediately after my directors report, Josh Gordon who's the new director of the National Institute of Mental Health will present a talk entitled update from the National Institute of Mental Health. And then after lunch, Patty Brennan who's the new director of the National Library of Medicine will present a talk entitled Data Science at NIH, Current State, Future Directions. Following that, there's going to be two presentations about implementing genomics in practice or our IGNITE program. First, councilmember Shanita Hughes-Helbert is going to give a report from the IGNITE and BEYOND workshop. And then second, Ebony Madden will present a concept clearance for IGNITE 2. We have yet more work to do in the open session. After that, Joy Boyer will present a second concept clearance although I believe we've now substituted a different speaker for that. Gene McEwen will instead give that presentation discussing a new concept for the Centers of Excellence in LC Research or CIR program. And then Ajay Pley is going to give a report about the recent computational genomics and data science workshop. And then the very end of our open session will be a presentation made by Chris Donahue of NHGRI who's going to talk about the NHGRI history of genomics program that I think some of you might be very interested to hear about. So that will be our open session. Moving on to my director's report, I'm going to go through these seven areas which provide a very nice framework for covering all the updates we want to share with you this morning. And we'll start with general NHGRI updates, although we actually only have one. And so my one general NHGRI update actually will affect our council members and our council meetings. Some of NHGRI is actually going to be moving to a new work site in the summer of 2018. This will involve the entire staff of NHGRI's extramural research program. So I thought I would share this with you. So shown here is a map of the Montgomery County area where most of NIH is located. For reference, here is the location of the main NIH campus. Now all of us are physically located right now here, located in a building that actually houses the staff of our extramural research program and also the site of these council meetings. This building is roughly five miles from the main NIH campus. This is going to all change though. In the summer of 2018, NIH will be vacating this building when the lease expires. Now, given new federal government-wide space policies, we're actually required to reduce our new lease space to about 160 square foot or feet per person. And that includes all common space, such as corridors, conference rooms, et cetera. Well, using our collective requirements and the goal of reducing space and rent costs, NIH obtained a new lease at this location at 6700B Rock Spring Drive in Bethesda. And this is where NHGRI staff here at this Fisher's Lane building will be relocating in the summer of 2018. Now, let me zoom in on this area for you. And you can see that it actually consists of a cluster of leased buildings. NHGRI will be located in the building whose label is shown in blue. This building is part of what is called the Rock Spring Park cluster that houses several buildings now leased to multiple NIH institutes. This is actually sort of a mini-NIH campus of sorts. The cluster will house parts of the NIH components listed on the right. This alphabet soup of abbreviations reflects staff from over a dozen other institutes and centers as well as major parts of the NIH office of the director. Now, our new building will offer many amenities as well as a large conference center, just like the one you're sitting in right now. And this is likely where we're going to hold council meetings starting in late 2018. So I want to share that one update with you. Moving on then, let's talk about some general NIH updates starting at the way top. And that is a new secretary. Tom Price, a trained orthopedic surgeon, was sworn in as the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in February. Immediately prior to serving as secretary, he spent 20 years in politics, including six terms as a Republican congressman representing Georgia's sixth district. On February 21, Secretary Price actually visited the NIH campus when he met with NIH director Francis Collins and principal deputy director Larry Tabeck, and he also took a brief tour of the Clinical Research Center. Secretary Price promised to return to NIH for a longer visit in the near future. A sister agency of NIHs will soon be under new leadership. Scott Gottlieb, a trained internist, has been nominated by President Trump to be the next commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA. Previously, he served as FDA's deputy commissioner under President George W. Bush and a senior advisor at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He currently serves as a research fellow in the American Enterprise Institute, which is a conservative think tank, and as a member of the Federal Health IT Policy Committee. Now on April 27, Dr. Gottlieb testified before the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee and secured the committee's approval to move on to the final stage of confirmation that is a vote before the full Senate. Now, in some breaking news from last week, David Lipman, founding director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, or NCBI, will be departing NIH after 29 years. NCBI, which is a major component of the National Library of Medicine, produces and makes available more than 40 online databases, including such things as GenBank and PubMed, which are accessed daily by thousands of researchers worldwide. Among as many contributions, David helped to champion open science, including the establishment of PubMed Central, which is the public repository for all research articles arising from NIH-funded research. On June 1, Jim Astell, who's currently the chief of NCBI's Information Engineering Branch, will become acting director of NCBI until the appointment of a new director. Now, as you may have seen covered by the popular press, on March 2, Representative Virginia Fox, a Republican from North Carolina, introduced a bill entitled Preserving Employee Wellness Programs Act, or HR1313. As written, the bill would exempt workplace wellness programs from provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, or GINA. It would allow employers to offer inducements of up to 50 percent of the total cost of an employee's health insurance for participating in wellness programs that include obtaining genetic information, and yet it would still be in compliance with the ADA and GINA. The bill is regarded by many in the advocacy community as potentially undermining the privacy protections of the ADA and GINA. While HR1313 was passed by the House Education and Workforce Committee along party lines on March 8, however, Representative Fox and her staff are reevaluating the language in the bill and do not plan to bring it to the full house for a vote at this time. We expect, therefore, a new version of the bill to make an appearance in the future. Well, moving on to a topic of great interest and IH appropriations. Well, the federal government had been operating under several continuing resolutions, or CRs, for fiscal year 2017. The most recent two ended April 28, and then May 5, respectively. The good news? The good news is that we are open. The government retained and actually was open during this entire period. Then late last week, Congress passed a fiscal year 2017 budget. That budget, among other things, provides $2 billion of additional funding for NIH from $32.1 billion last year to $34.1 billion this year. NHGRI received a $16 million increase from $12 million to $528 million. This is obviously good news and NHGRI's research efforts will certainly benefit from these additional funds. At the same time, we now immediately transition to planning for next fiscal year where there is considerable uncertainty with respect to our future overall budget. Let me update you about that. So earlier this year, President Trump released what is called a skinny budget for fiscal year 2018, which provides a high-level overview of the President's fiscal goals for federal departments and agencies. The proposed budget included top-line numbers for the Department of Health and Human Services and, particularly for the NIH, with both slated for significant cuts. Specifically, the President called for NIH's budget in fiscal year 2018 to be reduced to $25.9 billion down from this year's $34.1 billion. The skinny budget document has limited explanatory text, but it did call for, quote, a major reorganization of NIH's institutes and centers to help focus resources on the highest priority research and training activities, end of quote. Some of this language seems to be referring to the indirect cost payments provided by NIH to its grantees. In its March 29th testimony in front of the House Appropriations Committee, Secretary Price indicated that reducing the amount that NIH pays for indirect cost would help minimize the consequences of reducing NIH's overall budget. As you are aware, though, the President proposes a budget, but Congress appropriates the funds. And therefore, when President Trump releases his more detailed fiscal year 2018 budget later this month, Congress will then have roughly four months to draft and put forth a complete budget that both chambers must pass and then the President must sign. It is notable that members of Congress, actually on both sides of the aisle, have publicly stated they will not support the President's proposed budget cut to NIH. Needless to say, all of this is a long winded way of saying, stay tuned. So with that, let me move on to general genomics updates. Starting with Stephen Finkel, who was given the 2017 American Society for Microbiology William A. Hinton Research Training Award. This award honors outstanding contributions towards fostering the research training of underrepresented minorities in microbiology. Stephen was the training coordinator for the University of Southern California's Center for Excellence in Genome Science or SEGs. McGill University Researcher and NHGRI advisor Rod McGinnis has been named Acting President of the Canadian Institute for Health Research or CIHR. Rod replaces Elaine Baudette, who previously served as CIHR President since 2008. Now, because of this new responsibility, Rod will actually need to reduce his involvement as an advisor for NHGRI's genome sequencing program, but we wish him all the best in his new pursuits. Also, in breaking news, last week, the National Academy of Sciences announced their newly elected members of particular relevance to the genomics community and to NHGRI are the individuals listed here, and we extend our heartfelt congratulations to these three individuals. In terms of meetings, in February, several members of NHGRI's staff participated in the first Global Biodiversity Genomics Conference, which was held here in the Washington, D.C. area. This meeting was sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute for Biodiversity Genomics and the Beijing Genomics Institute, with additional contributions from NHGRI and others. The meeting really nicely highlighted how genome sequencing technologies have decreased in cost to a point that it is now quite useful for the comparative evolution field and conservation biology field. The diversity of species with genome sequence data available continues to increase as do the number of biological questions that can be addressed using genomics and other omics types of data. It's notable that a typical mammalian genome sequence now costs approximately $20,000 to generate, depending upon how much and what types of data are used for this. And with these developments, the meeting particularly showcased how there's now great synergy between genomic studies of diverse species and work in human genomics, including the activities of many NHGRI consortia. The MIT Technology Review recently announced its top 10 breakthrough technologies for 2017. Among this group of 10 were two that related to genetics and genomics. The Cell Atlas was honored as a scheme to capture and characterize millions of cells using tools of modern genomics and cell biology. And second, gene therapy 2.0 was honored for the successful development of gene therapies for several rare diseases. Moving on to genomics in the news, there were two items I wanted to bring to your attention. In March, the Synthetic Yeast Genome Project published a series of papers in this issue of science describing the assembly of five synthetic yeast chromosomes based on the genome sequence of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The first synthetic yeast chromosome was assembled in March of 2014, but now there are now six such synthetic chromosomes, which represents more than one-third of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome that have been successfully engineered and replaced within yeast cells. Then in April, Nature published a news feature that we think very nicely showcased the human heredity and health in Africa or H3 Africa Initiative, which is an NIH Common Fund project co-led by NHGRI. The article discusses how investments in genomics research, such as those being pursued by H3 Africa, promises to get precision medicine off the ground in Africa. And as always, we like to tell you about genomes in the news. And as always, there seems to be a number of recently generated genome sequences reported since the last council meeting. These include the Mongolian yak, the pitcher plant, the northern snakehead fish, another goat, the crown of thorns starfish, the garden lettuce, arabica coffee, the Africanized killer bee, the Atlantic cod, and then an unprecedented surge in our genomic understanding of bears. We had the sun bear, the sloth bear, the asianic black bear, and the speckled bear. Those projects were quite a bear to complete, I was told. Okay, we'll quickly move on to our extramural research program. And we will start as we always do with our genome sequencing program. Now, the Centers for Common Disease Genomics, which is the largest component of NHGRI's genome sequencing program, are using large-scale genome sequencing to discover genomic variants underlying common disease, to learn about disease architectures and study designs, and also to identify rare risk and protective genomic variants. Now, these Centers are in their second year of funding and have generated genome sequences for over 5,100 samples across three disease categories. And this represents sequences generated from approximately 142,000 approved samples. Shown here is a table summarizing that sequence production broken down for each disease category, and also for whole genome sequences versus whole exome sequences. Now, among the 27,000 samples that have been sequenced for the study of cardiovascular diseases, including early onset coronary artery disease, early onset atrial fibrillation, and stroke, but more than 4,000 samples have been sequenced for the study of immune-mediated diseases, including asthma inflammatory bowel disease, and type 1 diabetes. And finally, over 20,000 samples have been sequenced for the study of neuropsychiatric diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, autism, and epilepsy. Now, the Centers for Common Disease Genomics are supported by co-funding from NHLBI, NIA, and NIMH, and the Centers are working well to reach their production goals. And collaborative analysis plans are currently in development. The next large component of our genome sequencing program is the Centers for Mendelian Genomics, which is now in its sixth year of funding. The program goals are to use genome sequencing and analysis approaches to discover the genomic basis underlying as many Mendelian traits and diseases as possible, and to accelerate discovery by disseminating methods and results. These centers have generated genome sequence data for more than 32,000 individuals representing diverse rare diseases and inheritance modes, mostly by whole exome sequencing and analysis. Over 20,000 samples were sequenced during phase one of the program, and already around 11,000 samples have been sequenced during the current phase phase two. The Centers for Mendelian Genomics have contributed to the discovery of 1,656 genes underlying rare diseases by what we regard as conservative criteria, with 928 representing novel gene phenotype associations. Additionally, 771 genes have been identified as likely to underline rare diseases by what we refer to as suggestive criteria, with 532 of those representing novel gene phenotype associations. The number of publications from phase one and phase two of the program now totals roughly 350, with the number of annual publications increasing each year. In addition to publishing papers, the Centers are publicly share appropriately consented sequence data and candidate disease genes. Now, our genome sequencing program held its annual consortium meeting in March. The Centers for Common Disease Genomics Centers for Mendelian Genomics Analysis Centers and Coordinating Center all presented updates on their progress. Major discussion topics included improved integration between the four components of our genome sequencing program and plans for collaborative analyses across the program and with other large genome sequencing efforts that are underway at NIH. Data sharing and distribution were discussed in many contexts. The Centers for Common Disease Genomics investigators also considered new research directions, such as how they might best deploy their technology improvement capabilities towards meeting the overall goals of the program. Attendance at this annual meeting has now grown over a hundred participants, as shown in this photograph, including consortium members, external advisors, NIH staff. NIH participants included representatives from the NHGRI and code and computational genomics and data science programs, various representatives of the NIH Common Fund, various NIH Common Fund programs, and a number of colleagues from other institutes and centers. This expanding participation in the meeting nicely reflects the growing sphere of collaboration that's going on between our genome sequencing program and the broader NIH. Moving on, NHGRI's technology development program continues to move forward, paving the way to new technologies and discoveries in genomics. An advanced genomic technology development meeting was held at Northeastern University last month. Novel DNA sequencing and genomic technology developers from the program will be held later this month at Northeastern. They'll come together over several days to facilitate collaborative and collaborations and interactions. An adjacent public meeting will allow broader community participation. Two funding opportunities deserve highlighting, request for applications for novel nucleic acid sequencing technology development are soliciting applications that involve both DNA and direct RNA sequencing. The most recent set of applications was discussed at the February Council meeting, and these awards have largely been made. The next application due date is in mid-June. Program announcements for novel genomic technology development are resulting in a breadth of submitted applications ranging from advanced tools and critical reagents to the development of epigenomic and genomic profile and assays. The current set of applications have undergone review and will be discussed at this Council meeting. Meanwhile, the next application due date is in late October. The goal of NHGRI's Encyclopedia of DNA Elements or ENCODE project is to create catalogs of all functional elements in the human and mouse genomes and to make those catalogs available as a resource to the biomedical community. I wanted to bring to your attention an ENCODE- like funding opportunity at another NIH Institute. Specifically, the National Institute of Mental Health has issued program announcements to expand the efforts of the PSYCH ENCODE project, an effort related to ENCODE. The aim of these announcements is to support research in the discovery and characterization of non-coding genomic elements that are functional across brain regions, cell types and developmental time periods to elucidate their possible role in the molecular pathophysiology of mental illness. The receipt dates for this program announcement are July 6th of this year, June 6th of next year and June 6th of 2019. The Centers of Excellence in Genomic Science or SEGs pursue interdisciplinary projects to develop innovative approaches to advance genomic science or genomic medicine. Pictured here are the awardees at the SEGs grantee meeting last fall. NHGRI recently made two SEGs awards. The Center for Cell Circuits at the Broad Institute, led by Council member Aviv Ragev, was renewed for a second five years. The focus of this SEGs is understanding cellular circuits by developing and applying massively parallel analyses, measuring many outputs, developing computational models and testing the models by perturbing circuit components. This renewal will advance the work from single cells to groups of interacting cells. The new Center for Dynamic RNA Epitransgrimomics at the University of Chicago, led by Shu'an He, will develop new methods for high throughput sequencing of RNA modifications at single base resolution and bioinformatics tools for data analyses. The SEGs program announcement was reissued last September, with the next due date for the program being later this month. Moving on to computational and data science topics, the Alliance of Genome Resources or AGR aims to enhance our understanding of human biology, health, and disease through the use of model organisms. The Alliance was established in the summer of 2016 to align the set of model organism databases, including NHGRI-funded fly base, worm base, saccharomyces, genome database, mouse genome base, zebrafish information network, and the gene ontology consortium, as well as the NHLBI-funded rat genome database. The AGR held a meeting this past March, and the goal of the meeting was for the AGR to share its plans with the research community and to review the progress made so far. The meeting was organized by Council Member Carol Bolt, along with other AGR investigators. Meeting participants included members of the model organism research community, the AGR investigators and key personnel, AGR's Scientific Advisory Board, and NIH staff, including National Library of Medicine Director Petty Brennan and myself. The Scientific Advisory Board and community members were enthusiastic about the progress made to date and offered recommendations for further development. Participants were especially interested in the development of a common data model and AGR's plans for a full release of a portal in October of 2017 that will facilitate queries across the different component resources. Now in February, Council approved a concept for a new NHGRI data resource for which we are using the temporary working name of NHGRI Sandbox. As outlined in that concept presentation, NHGRI proposes the establishment of a new resource that will democratize genomic data access sharing and computing. The resource will leverage scalable cloud-based infrastructure to co-locate data storage and computing capacity with commonly used tools for analyzing and sharing genomic data. Now in the concept document presented at the February Council meeting, we stated that this new resource would be funded by a contract to satisfy the requirements for NIH trusted partners. Now since that Council meeting, after weighing pros and cons and considering different options in greater detail, we have now decided to use a cooperative agreement funding mechanism for creating this resource and are actively considering how that might affect programmatic activities included within the initiative. Because of this change in funding mechanism, we are able to share a budget estimate for the proposal as we do with concepts for other cooperative agreements. Our current estimate for the base amount of funding to establish and maintain this new resource is $5 million per year for five years. The Electronic Medical Records and Genomics or Emerge Network conducts genomic discovery and clinical implementation research by leveraging data from large biorepositories linked to Electronic Medical Records. In February, Emerge Investigators published three major papers. The first study entitled Genome-Wide Study of Resistant Hypertension Identified from Electronic Health Records tested more than 2.5 million single nucleotide polymorphisms for association among 2,380 multi-ethnic cases of resistant hypertension in 876 cases with controlled hypertension. The second study entitled Identification of Unique Venus Thromboembolism Susceptibility Variants in African Americans used a GWAS approach and identified unique genomic variants that appear to be associated with Venus Thromboembolism in African Americans. The last entitled Public Attitudes Toward Consent and Data Sharing in Biobank Research a large multi-site experimental survey in the U.S. reported that 66% of the recruited participants were happy to participate in a biobank, 86% want to know what would happen if a researcher misused their health information and 51% worry about their privacy. These findings have immediate policy implications for broad consent and data sharing in biomedical research. In addition to these three articles 35 abstracts from the Emerge Network were accepted for the 2017 American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics or ACMG meeting and 16 abstracts were accepted for the 2017 American Medical Informatics Association meeting including eight podium presentations. Moving on to other initiatives in the genomic medicine arena the clinical genome resource or ClinGen defines and disseminates the clinical relevance of genomic variants for use in precision medicine and research. ClinGen shared their first gene discovery clinical validity framework through a paper submitted to the bioarchive preprint server. This openly available preprint provides the community access to ClinGen's latest methods. Results in supporting evidence for all gene disease pairs curated with this framework are now available on ClinGen's consortium website. The paper is also now impressed at the American Journal of Human Genetics. As part of ClinGen's efforts to improve agreement of genomic variant interpretations amongst clinical laboratories for laboratories that share data with ClinVar collaborated to examine their interpretation differences. This effort allowed them to increase their overall concordance from 88% to 92% as described in this genomics and medicine paper that highlighted the value of sharing genomic variant interpretations through ClinVar. ClinGen's growing engagement with professional societies led to the American Society of Hematology to sponsor two expert panels for genomic variant curation, one on familial leukemia and one on non malignant hematologic diseases. This increases the number of ClinGen expert panels to 19, three of which have just submitted their consensus curated results to ClinVar. And lastly, ClinGen and its related consortium in the United Kingdom to cipher are cosponsoring the third annual curating the clinical genome meeting in late June. This should be a highly relevant and exciting genomic medicine meeting, the meeting agenda and registration for which are available on ClinGen's website. Moving on to the clinical genome I mean the clinical sequencing exploratory research or CSER program which focuses on the integration of genome sequencing into the clinical workflow including the generation interpretation and clinical reporting of genomic information. CSER has now enrolled over 5,200 adults and over 1,300 children and for over 5,100 of these individuals germline genome sequence data will be generated and for over 1,200 of these individuals tumor genome sequence data will be generated. As one measure of overall impact CSER has now generated 312 publications including 20 cross- CSER working group publications. In February the CSER consortium joined forces with NHGRI's Emerge Network to hold a meeting entitled Emerge and CSER the convergence of genomics and medicine. Highlights included talks on the top five achievements from CSER and from Emerge, the revised American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics gene list, family cascade testing and opportunities for healthcare quality improvements and quality measurements in genomics. Approximately 180 members of both programs attended in person and the Genome TV live stream had 251 unique views from 22 different countries. CSER was prominently featured at the recent ACMG meeting specifically there were 21 CSER related posters and presentations including talks on genome sequencing of healthy individuals developing care models for patients with secondary findings and enriching racial and ethnic diversity to improve genomic medicine. One recent highlight from CSER is a guide to interpreting genomic reports created by CSER's practitioner education working group. The guide available online at the American Society of Human Genetics website is designed to help non-geneticist healthcare providers understand and interpret their patients genomic test reports. Using an intuitive and user-friendly interface the guide includes an overview of genomic testing and describes the categories of genomic variant classification as well as the different kinds of information provided by genomic tests. This information might include diagnostic results as shown in the sample section. Other sections focus on uncertain results no findings medically actionable secondary results common risk alleles carrier status and pharmacogenomics. A glossary of common genetic and genomic terms is also included associated with the guide. Moving on the implementing genomics in practice or ignite network works to enhance the use of genomic medicine by supporting the development of methods for incorporating genomic information into clinical care. To date the network has published over 90 papers and has made over 250 presentations. Many of those presentations were given at the recent precision medicine conference hosted by ignite investigator Julie Johnson of the University of Florida. The conference included about 30 poster presentations focused on the implementation of precision medicine. Another important product of the ignite network is the spark toolbox resource which has the title supporting practice through application resources and knowledge. This online resource serves as an interactive data repository to assist in the implementation of genomic medicine. Ignite investigators the University of Florida have reorganized this website substantially to focus resources for researchers and clinicians and make the process of finding resources more intuitive. These website changes will go live by the summer of 2017. Moving on a couple things to report the ethical, legal and social implications or LC research program which of course investigates the implication of genomics for individuals, families and communities is partnering with the Jackson laboratory Columbia University and UConn Health to hold the fourth LC Congress in June. This is the premier conference on LC research and will address a wide range of LC issues in both genome science and genomic medicine as well as broader social and legal implications of genomics. The Congress will include a mix of talks, workshops and panel presentations and posters. Keynote and plenary speakers include Eric Dishman, Alondra Nelson, Wiley Burke, James Evans and Pearl Orr Work. Their talks will cover a range of topics including genome sequencing in the clinic, genes ancestry and identity and more. The preliminary program and registration information is available online. And then our genomics and society working group of this council was established in 2012 to provide advice on long range planning and priority setting for genomics and society activities at our institute. At the next in-person meeting on May 26th and 25th and 26th the group will say farewell to long-time working group member and former council member Artie Rye. That will also be the final meeting for Lisa Parker, the outgoing chair and an original working group member. Now joining current working group members Gal Henderson, Shanita Hughes-Halbert and Dave Vinstra will be new members as follows. That includes council member Jeff Botkin who will serve as the incoming chair. Steve Jaffee at the University from the University of Pennsylvania. Max Melman of Case Western Reserve University. Melanie Myers of the University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati Children's Hospital. And Sandra Soo-Jin Lee of Stanford University. And HR looks forward to their advice and guidance that will be provided at this upcoming meeting of the working group. So moving on to the common fund and trans NIH efforts starting with the LINX program. The library of integrated network-based cellular signatures program aims to create a network-based understanding of biology by cataloging changes in gene expression and other cellular processes. LINX uses computational tools to integrate this diverse information for the development of new biomarkers and therapeutics. Now LINX held its mid course review meeting in January which included presentations on progress in each center and future challenges. The review closed with a discussion between NIH program staff and the LINX external scientific panel that focused on enhancing the utility of LINX data for the research community. And two major recommendations were made. First, the project should generate representative transcript omics data at each center that will enhance interoperability of all LINX data. And second, the program should hire senior post senior joint postdocs that will focus on integrative data analysis across LINX data sets. Outreach continues to be a priority for LINX. In fact, five LINX investigators made presentations at a well attended satellite meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research or AACR meeting in April. Pictured here is a presentation by Laura Heiser, a LINX consortium member at that session. The Human Heredity in Health in Africa or H3Africa initiatives central goal is to develop a sustainable, collaborative African genomics research enterprise. Now in April, the H3Africa Biorepositories published six articles in a special issue of the journal Biopreservation and Biobanking highlighting the establishment of a network of bioretopositories that stretches across western eastern and southern Africa. The upcoming special issue of Global Heart focusing on cardiovascular and non-communicable disease in Africa populations will also feature six manuscripts from H3Africa's research projects. The tenth and final H3Africa consortium meeting of stage one starts Friday in Gabarone, Botswana. Several of us, including myself, will be getting on a plane over the next few days after this council meeting in order to attend. At the consortium meeting, current H3Africa investigators along with a student from each project will present their progress and plans for the future. The meeting will include joint resources information session with the National Library of Medicine and a pharmacogenomics satellite workshop. The H3Africa working groups will be meeting to finalize manuscripts including two of particular note, one manuscript describing the design and performance of a new H3Africa genotyping array and the other focusing on population genomics across the continent using whole genome sequence data from H3Africa projects along with public data. Applications for stage two of H3Africa will be discussed later in this council meeting. The NIH Common Funds Undiagnosed Diseases Network or UDN aims to improve the level of diagnosis and care for patients with undiagnosed diseases, facilitate research into the etiology of those diseases and create an integrated and collaborative research community to identify and share improved options for optimal patient management. To date, the UDN has received over 1300 applications and accepted 545 participants for evaluation at the seven UDN clinical sites across the nation to apply access the UDN gateway by clicking on the apply button which appears on all UDN web pages. And recently, the UDN published a marker paper describing the network in the American Journal of Human Genetics, this commentary entitled The Undiagnosed Diseases Network Accelerating Discovery about Health and Disease describes the lessons learned in building the UDN with the goal of stimulating dissemination of the UDN diagnostic model. Moving on to the TransNIH All of Us research program, this program aims to engage at least a million Americans in a research program to design to improve health through a data-driven approach to precision medicine. Participants will be empowered to manage their health through opportunities generated by genome sequencing, aggregation of longitude and the health information and sharing of data all under a cooperative model of partnership and trust. The program will also responsibly return results and share aggregate findings so that all volunteers may have the opportunity to benefit from the science. To those ends, in early March, a workshop on return of genetic results was convened to review the latest in returning genetic and genomic results to research participants and to discuss how current best practices might be translated to the scale of the All of Us research program. Nine panels discussed a variety of topics related to returning genomic results at scale including genomic variant interpretation, return of non-clinical results, participant voices, ethical, legal and regulatory considerations in clinical laboratory perspectives. Attendees represented a broad range of perspectives including researchers, healthcare providers, clinical laboratories, study participants, industry and regulators. Needless to say, NHGRI was well represented at the meeting. Our staff was heavily involved in helping to organize the meeting and about half of the panelists were actually NHGRI grantees. And then earlier this year NIH selected Dara Richardson-Haran as the Chief Engagement Officer for the All of Us Research Program. Dara will lead outreach efforts to enroll and retain one million or more All of Us participants. She joins NIH from YMCA USA where she served as Chief Executive Officer for more than four years. Previous to that though, she served as the Chief Executive Officer of the Greater New York City affiliate of Susan G. Coleman for the Cure. She served as National Chief Medical Officer at the United Cerebral Palsy Association, also Assistant Executive Director and Chief Medical Officer at the United Cerebral Palsy of New York City and Executive Medical Director at Consolidated Edison Company of New York Incorporated. Moving on then to NHGRI's Division of Policy Communications and Education, a number of updates. Starting with one from April because in April the FDA announced that it will allow 23 ME customers to elect to receive genetic risk information for 10 conditions, including Parkinson's disease, late onset Alzheimer's disease, Celiac disease, and also Gauchay's disease. This marks a significant shift in the direct-to-consumer or DTC regulatory landscape since 2013 when the FDA actually ordered 23 ME to discontinue the return of health information until receipt of FDA approval. After that earlier FDA action, 23 ME was only permitted to return ancestry data and information about traits such as eye color and caffeine metabolism. By working closely with the FDA, 23 ME eventually gained approval to return carrier testing results in 2015. And then with this latest approval, the return genetic risk information, however, cannot be marketed as being diagnostic. The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine released a report in March outlining a framework for making evidence-based decisions for genetic testing. The Department of Defense actually commissioned this report roughly a year ago to aid military health care coverage decisions because the insurance program that serves service members and their families, called TRICARE, currently only covers FDA-approved tests. This insurance program therefore prohibits payment for the vast majority of genetic tests. Now the report aimed to provide an evidence-based for genetic tests recommendations for how the military can promote evidence generation and a decision-making framework for genetic testing coverage in the future. Now in light of the fact that evidence is lacking and still being generated for most genetic tests, the report ended up passing on the first aim. The committee actually recommended that the Department of Defense advance the evidence base by supporting independent and collaborative research and depositing data in repositories such as ClinVar. The report does provide a framework to guide insurance administrators in their coverage decision-making. NHGRI is now sharing our research news and program successes on Reddit, a social news and discussion forum that is becoming increasingly popular among the science community. Through Reddit's Ask Me Anything or AMA series, NHGRI staff can take part in interactive dialogues with member of the Reddit community to answer questions about genomics. So for example, Elise Feingold, Mike Payson and Dan Gilchrist who are program directors for the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, or ENCODE project, joined ENCODE researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, to answer questions about their efforts to build a catalog of functional elements in the human genome. In another AMA session, coinciding with Rare Disease Day, Bill Gaul and Cindy Tiff answered questions about how they are helping to solve medical mysteries as part of the undiagnosed diseases network. And these two AMAs were quite successful with a total reach of 13.2 and 2.83 million people respectively. And we're planning for more AMA sessions in the future. The NHGRI Smithsonian Genome Unlocking Life's Code Exhibition will make several more stops across North America as it continues its road show during 2017. The exhibition opened on April 1st in the Peoria Riverfront Museum in Peoria, Illinois. Next month it'll travel to the Health Museum in Houston, Texas. And later this year it will cross our northern border for the first time traveling to Ontario for a stop at Science North. And last month I actually traveled to Peoria, Illinois with Les Beeserker of NHGRI's Intramural Research Program for a public program at the Peoria Riverfront Museum. Les and I both spoke at an evening program at the museum that was attended by high school and college students as well as the general public. And earlier in the day we visited the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria giving grand rounds and also speaking in a symposium on Genomics and Precision Medicine. And we urge you to please continue to check the exhibition's website and follow it on social media for its most up-to-date programming information. For those who didn't realize April 25th was National DNA Day and like we do every year NHGRI hosted celebrations to mark the occasion. On DNA Day itself NHGRI partnered with NIH's Office of the Director and held a Twitter chat that included me, Francis Collins and NASA astronaut Dr. Kate Rubens who completed a stay on the International Space Station this past October. A trained biomedical researcher Kate became the first person to sequence DNA in space last fall. During the Twitter chat we answered questions about genomics and genetics and Kate also answered questions about her time in space. Later in the day Kate gave a presentation to NIH staff about her research in space and engaged in a Q&A with Francis Collins answering questions from a Facebook live audience. Now in other events of the day, NHGRI also partnered with the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History for its Human Origins Today or Hot Topic event. NHGRI's Dana Dregger gave a talk about how human migration and culture is reflected by dog breed development. And last year, I mean lastly, the National DNA Day website featured its National DNA Day events map where organizations hosting DNA Day events across the country could post their event information. And more than 190 DNA events were held across the country this year. Now as I mentioned to council in February, NHGRI partnered with the Foundation for NIH to hold a strategic visioning meeting for proposed genomic literacy, education and engagement or GLI initiative. That meeting was during a snowy couple of days in March and nonetheless 160 people attended the meeting from diverse communities including academia, industry, community-based organizations, nonprofits, government and K through 16 education organizations. Despite the snow, the collective enthusiasm, creativity and thoughtful conversation reinforced to us that there is a clear need for an effort like GLI. Specifically, the meeting solidified our thinking that it would be desirable to have the GLI initiative move forward to enhance the genomic literacy of K through 16 students and teachers, healthcare providers and the general public with its many communities across the United States. Various materials associated with this meeting including pre-meeting white papers, synthesis documents from each of the three working groups and a meeting report are now available on genome.gov and there is considerable effort currently being made in establishing how best to move the GLI initiative forward. So stay tuned for more updates about this in the future. Meanwhile, NHGRI's Education and Community Involvement Branch leads the Trans-NIH Community Engagement Interest Group which brings together staff from several NIH institutes to discuss community engagement in research activities. The group has planned several community health studios to take place in the DC metropolitan area. Each of these events is designed to promote a better understanding of the interactions and experiences of local community members and leaders with the NIH and with the biomedical research enterprise more generally. Now the first of these studios was held in April at Gallaudet University in Washington DC which is an institution that is dedicated to deaf and hard of hearing students, educators and researchers. Facilitators from the university led a three-hour conversation with students, faculty and researchers about their positive and not so positive experiences with government agencies and health and community organizations. Themes from the discussion included deafness being treated as a genetic variation rather than a mutation, the need for increased health literacy including genomics among the deaf, hard of hearing and deafblind communities, and a desire for internships at NIH for Gallaudet students to engage in biomedical research activities. Now two more such studios are being planned for the summer and early fall with representatives from diverse communities including faith-based institutions, seniors, minority-serving institutions and local advisory groups to name a few. And lastly, the Inner Society Coordinating Committee for Practitioner Education or ISCC aims to improve genomic literacy in health practitioners and to enhance the practice of genomic medicine. In January, the sixth in-person ISCC meeting was held and included roughly 40 people both in-person and via Webex. The goals of this meeting were to share genomic education activities, needs and interests among member organizations to learn about opportunities and needs for funding provider education activities. Seventeen speakers presented their organizations activities and this included presentations about activities in other countries such as New South Wales, Australia and Canada. In addition, Heather Junkins and Extramural Program Director in our Division of Genomic Medicine explained NHGRI's existing funding mechanisms for funding educational meetings and training and led a discussion among attendees to capture specific needs regarding the funding of provider education activities in genomics. And the meeting ended up resulting in the establishment of a new working group dubbed Building Bridges which will aim to facilitate partnerships among creators, adapters, disseminators and evaluators of genomic education materials. And lastly, I'll just have a few things to say about the Institute's Intramural Research Program starting with an honor Ellen Sudranski was elected to the Association of American Physicians or AAP. This is an organization composed of leading senior physician scientists. Now Ellen is head of the Molecular Neurogenetics Section and Senior Investigator in the Medical Genetics Branch of our Institute's Intramural Research Program. This honor reflects Ellen's research accomplishment studying the biology and genetics of both Gauchet disease which is a rare recessively inherited disorder with highly variable symptoms and Parkinson's disease a common complex disorder. In terms of appointments Laura Caley has been appointed the Chief of NSURI's Social Behavioral Research Branch. Laura actually joined this our Intramural Program and this branch in 2005 initially as a tenure track investigator and has since been tenured. Her research aims to understand the social, psychological and behavioral environment of families and communities at risk for hereditary disease with particular emphasis on studying the intersection between genomic risk information and social relationships. So we congratulate Laura for being appointed Branch Chief. And finally, NHGRI's Intramural Research Program has as always been quite active and productive since the last council meeting just to name a few highlights. Max Muka and colleagues used facial recognition software to diagnose the rare genetic disease de George syndrome in Africans, Asians and Latin Americans. This is the newest addition to the Atlas of Human Malformations in Diverse Population's website that he launched last year. Adam Felipe and colleagues developed a new technique for reconstructing highly accurate reference genome sequences and applied it to sequencing the genome of the domestic goat. Specifically they combined packed bio sequencing optical mapping in high C to produce a comprehensive and accurate genome sequence of the goat genome at a significantly reduced cost. Stacey Loftus and colleagues discovered new genes in genetic pathways and primary melanoma that may be associated with how melanoma spreads. The findings could give researchers new targets for developing personalized treatments for melanoma and other cancers. And finally, Elaine Ostrander and her colleagues analyzed genomic information from over a thousand dogs to discover new relationships among different breeds and to infer how disease causing mutations have been passed among breeds. These findings could help illuminate information about the causes of diseases that affect both humans and dogs. And as always, before any of my directors report I will put in a shameless plug and say that anyone wishing to receive my monthly email update the genomics landscape can simply go to this website and register to be on that listserv. And I will end as always thanking the huge efforts of NHRI staff and putting together the slides and information and synthesizing it in a form that allows me to present it in as rapid a fashion as I can. By 50 to 60 people were involved in this as a group effort and I could not do this without them. I also want to additionally thank the NHRI communications group to help putting together the electronic resource and all the archival materials that people will be able to review in the future. And a special thanks go to the usual ringleader Chris Wetterstrand shown here is Chris out in the rain at one of the many marches in Washington DC and I'll just leave it at that. And with that I will close my director's report and I'm happy to take any questions you may have. Thank you. Questions, comments? Jeff. I just wanted to emphasize the concern about HR 1313. I know that's in an early stage at this point but I think we know from a long history that concerns around genetic discrimination are primary concerns for people considering participation both in genetic research as well as clinical genetic testing. The dual protections have been GINA and the Affordable Care Act. So the preexisting elements of the Affordable Care Act of course are under much national debate right now but should both of those layers of protection be lost that would be a profound impact on the kind of work we do both clinically and in research. And Jeff we absolutely share that view at the Institute and our policy group in particular is tracking this very closely and we will be as helpful as we can possibly be to inform the relevant people of the important issues surrounding this topic and make sure that those positions are well known to those who are going to ultimately make these votes and decisions. Anything else?