 Good afternoon. Good morning, everyone. I would like to welcome you to this public session of the committee on research at multiple scales, a vision for continental scale biology. My name is Jack Liu. I'm a professor at Michigan State University, also the committee chair. The committee's work is being conducted under the sponsorship of the National Academy of Sciences. Engineering and medicine in response to a request from the National Science Foundation. The committee's statement of task is available on the National Academy's website. Today, the committee will hear presentation on the committee's statement of task by Dr. Ken of the National Science Foundation. Committee members will then have opportunity to ask questions about the statement of task and NSF solution for the study. The committee and the presenters will not entertain any questions from persons outside of the committee. After the committee, however, anyone who wish to submit written comments or other materials that are relevant to our charges should contact Dr. Cliff Duke, the responsible staff officer for this study. I would like to emphasize that this is a information gathering session and the comments made by individuals should not be interpreted as positions of the committee or of the national academies. And I want to note that this entire session is on the record and it's being recorded. Before we begin the presentation, I would like to ask the committee members to briefly introduce themselves to the audience and indicate the affiliation. Hi, I'm Jeanine. I don't believe Jeanine is out here. Hi, yes, I'm Jeanine. I'm in at the University of Minnesota and the Department of Ecology Evolution behavior of a plant physiological and evolutionary ecologist and connect remote sensing to plant function across scales. Thank you. Hi, my name is Bala Chaudhry. I'm a professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College, and I am a soil ecologist. Thank you, Brian. Right. Hi Matt. We miss you here in Tucson. I'm a macro ecologist and plants interest in plant eco physiology and questions of scaling up in ecology. And so it's good to see you again. Thank you. Jack Gilbert. Yeah, Jack Gilbert, professor of pediatrics and oceanography and associate vice chancellor for marine science at University of California San Diego. And have a long history of doing large scale microbiome analysis of soils terrestrial systems aquatic systems and atmosphere and if we're met and passed. Thank you. Hi, my name is Louise Glass. I'm in the plant microbial biology department at the University of California at Berkeley I work on fungi primarily using a systems biology approaches. I didn't assist Scott here Scott here. Stephanie. Hi Matt, I'm Stephanie Hampton. You may remember me from having worked with me. I'm deputy director of the biosphere sciences and engineering division at Carnegie Institution for science in Pasadena. Thank you. Hello, I'm in a Sibana at the University of Michigan and I'm a global change ecologist. Thank you. Chelsea. Hi Matt, my name is Chelsea Ford Miniat. I work at the USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station, where I am a program manager of a dry land ecosystem program that spans six states across the inter mountain west. And the focus of my program is to look at the impacts of climate change and climate variability on ecosystems in the inter mountain west across scales. And I'm in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Great. Thank you. She hit. And I'm a professor of ecology at Columbia University in the department of ecology evolution and environmental biology. And my research focuses on the ecosystem service and functional consequences of biodiversity loss I don't have any particular taxonomic or ecosystem focus my lab works on just about everything. I'm currently working in the Arctic and in temperate forests really interested in being able to scale up what happens when you lose biodiversity to ecosystem services across scales. Right. Thank you. We have another committee member, maybe she is not able to join us today, but we'll have this recording she can watch later. So it's my great pleasure to introduce our presenter today. Dr. Matt can he is a deputy division director of the national science foundation. He has spent more than 23 years at NSF, and Dr. Ken has saved us the program director and at both the division of environment biology and division of molecular and cellular biosciences and acting deputy division director. He has managed or co-managed more than a dozen different programs and the review of over 3000 proposals and has worked with colleagues throughout the foundation and with many other federal agencies. In addition to his current role in ecosystem science clusters. And Dr. King is the managing program director for the environment data science inclusion and innovation lab. This is a new lab. This is the micro system biology and the Neon enabled science program. Dr. Ken is a fellow of the American Association for advancement of science and has chaired the general and applied microbiology division group of the American society for my my my my my my my my my. Before he joined NSF, he held positions at the Smithsonian Institution and Harvard University and was a NSF postdoc fellow at the University of Illinois. And Dr. Kane received his BS in biology at the University of Michigan and his PhD in microbiology at Michigan State University. Now Dr. Kane, the floor is yours. Thank you. Thanks very much for that nice introduction, Jack. And thanks to everybody on this committee for agreeing to serve and for the work you're going to be doing. Really appreciate that. I'm gonna start sharing my slides. Okay. Everybody see that? Yes. All right. So, okay. First thing I wanted to mention to the committee is obviously you're going to be working and meeting and hearing lots of people talk over the next, however long it takes to put together a report. But it's important before you put together your report to see what other reports are out there. And I'm confident that Cliff and his staff at the National Academy will help make these available to you. There are at least a couple of National Academy or NRC reports. There's of course a very important neon report that came out over 15 years ago now from the National Academy. They had a big impact on NSF's development of the National Ecological Observatory Network. There's also the report, a new biology for the 21st century. And then there's also, you can have a look at the advisory committee to the biology directorate. In recent years, for example, they produced a report on helping to enable the user community for neon. And there's reports from other agencies such as NASA's new report on remote sensing. So we're hoping that this report is going to do something new. It's going to look forward and provide a vision in particular for understanding biological phenomena at continental scale, okay? Let's see if I can advance these, there we go. So the biology directorate at NSF is divided into four divisions. And three of these divisions encompass different parts of biological scale. Molecular and cellular biosciences covers the molecular on up into the organismal scale. Integrative and organismal systems, iOS starts down at the cellular level and moves up into the community level. And then finally, the division of environmental biology that I'm in spans things that the organism population level on up to the biosphere and even the planet. And then we have a division of biological infrastructure that provides various program opportunities that span this whole scale of size. And not coincidentally, the infrastructure that known as NEON, the National Ecological Observatory Network, currently the largest producer of open environmental biology data in the world is managed out of the division of biological infrastructure. NSF has also, the bio directorate in NSF has been interested in integrative activities of a variety of types. We had a series of no innovation workshops on reintegrating biology. One of the things to follow from that is our program opportunity to create biology integration institutes. We've, for a number of years, had one of the NSF big ideas, so-called big ideas of understanding the rules of life. And then we have integrative programs like dynamics of integrated socio-environmental systems or DISIS. We have the ecology and evolution of infectious disease, EID, and the macro system biology, NEON-enabled science program. These are just examples. But the biology directorate has had a sustained interest in integrating cross-scales and now in particular, especially with NEON coming online four years ago and with the other sources of open environmental data that can be marshaled to understand phenomena at regional and even continental or larger scales, planetary scales. The biology directorate is interested in your help in helping us understand where are things going? Where do they need to go? What do they need to get there? So the next few examples I'm going to run through just to get us to think boldly about things are, we want you to identify the questions, the ideas that frame where the next frontiers are going to be in understanding biological phenomena at the continental scale. What are the tools? How can we leverage those tools? In the words, I like to think of the movie, the social network, in which they describe the coming of age of Facebook as the phrase is used, what is the next big thing, right? What is the next big application that's going to be critical to everyone, that they want to be a part of, that they want to use? They want to obtain information with. So what are the next big things when it comes to continental scale biology? And then finally, from a people perspective, it's very important particularly today, how do we make continental scale biology equitable, inclusive and make it relevant to society, make it relevant to the nation? How is it going to be important for the future economic and other aspects of prosperity in our country? So next frontiers, some examples. We've been looking at data for several decades now about increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. Where is all this CO2 going to go? It keeps increasing. There are some who think that the soil and land is going to absorb most of it, perhaps as much as 80% of it. Certainly the ocean is going to play a part in absorbing some of it too. It's already having an impact, helping to acidify the ocean. You know, there's an old equation I learned in graduate school called the Henderson-Hasselbach equation that looks at how acid forms when you increase CO2 partial pressure. That's what we have going on in the ocean. And then, you know, how much of it is going to continue to fill up the atmosphere? That's the kind of big bold question we need to answer in terms of understanding biological phenomena on the continent. How is the CO2 going to impact the nation's forests, the agriculture and soil fertility, for example? Another example next frontier is what is the future of Earth's biodiversity? You know, what is the scope of biodiversity to begin with? We know that from the last several decades of work in microbial systems and sequencing genomes that microbial diversity is far greater than we've been able to understand and sample. What is happening to microbial biodiversity and how is that going to help shape phenomena at continental scale? How can we map diversity, whether it's microbes or birds, mammals, amphibians? How can we best map their location, their movement, their changes in life history and phenology? And then of course, how does a biodiversity feedback into other environmental change, right? We've got environmental change, climate change going on. We've got changes in land use patterns, changes in the human component of Earth that Anna. So how is biology at continental scale going to be interacting with changes in human behavior, in human population numbers, in the economy, in economic activities? And how do these feedback on changes in biodiversity, right? So then from the perspective of what are the next big things, how can we leverage infrastructure and open data? These are some examples of sources of open data. Neon, of course, the LTER network, the NASA satellite system known as Jedi. Other sources of open data like the iDigBio integrated digitized biological collections and the global biodiversity information system, GBIF. Lots of sources of open data. How can these be leveraged to understand and capture what's going on in biology at continental scale? And then as soon as you start to envision all this huge deluge of data, whether the data is in the form of satellite data or remote sensing data from the neon airborne observational platforms or drone data or ground-based data or genomic data, just huge amounts of data, what we need, of course, is to understand how computing is going to help understand and integrate all this information, whether it's machine learning, EBL, artificial intelligence, cloud computing. I'm sure everybody's aware of the new chat GPT artificial intelligence tool. It's unbelievable the impact that artificial intelligence is having in environmental analysis of large datasets. And what are the tools that we need to best harness computing to leverage all of this open environmental data? What is the vision for the next five to 10 to 20 years for continental scale biology? Then finally, we need to think about people, right? How is the science of continental scale biology going to be equitable, inclusive, and relevant to society? One area that NSF has begun funding in part in this area is our newest synthesis center, the Environmental Data Science Innovation and Inclusion Lab or EZL. And a very significant portion of EZL's efforts are geared towards building partnerships to enable more inclusive and equitable access to open environmental data. The data from something like NEON is available to anyone, not just people at large research universities. And so the potential for harnessing people power and the collective zeitgeist of ideas that could be out there, whether they're at predominantly undergraduate institutes or large research universities, there's a democratizing factor of open data that we wanna help harness and we've charged this new synthesis center with helping us do that. The other thing that's really important to think about is something known as the bioeconomy. A lot of times when people hear the word bioeconomy, they think of, you know, biotechnology and how biotechnology can produce economic impacts. But open environmental data at continental scale is going to be critical, for example, for understanding how freshwater resources are changing and where they're going to be accessible and where they're not going, where they're going to be in short supply. It's going to be critical for understanding where fertile soil is going to be 20 to 50 years from now. That's going to have huge, huge impacts on our nation's economic prosperity. And being able to predict and understand these changes is really critical to society. So we'd like this committee to think about the impact on people and the people's impact on the future of continental scale biological science. And I think with that, thanks some folks who I've had discussions with during the past couple of weeks about this talk. Liz Blood, Mike Brinford, Kyla Dahlin, Jared Deshoff, Paul Hansen and Anuj Karpatni and of course all my colleagues at NSF who support what we do. And I'll stop sharing slides and we can take any questions you have. Yeah, thank you so much. And for this very insightful, informative presentation, this is really useful for the committee for us to think boldly and big ideas and bigger frontier, new frontiers and new tools and also relevant to society to create a equitable and inclusive community. I think those are the really important issues for us to keep in mind when we work on the report. And I would like to open up for questions before I ask other people to ask you questions. Also, Chair, I will ask the first question. And what specific expectation does NSF have regarding the committee report? So we want the report to be comprehensive, expansive, we want you to not, we want you to be aware of the past, we want you to be cognizant of other reports, but what we're looking for is a vision, right? For the future, we're looking for help from you to identify from the National Academy to identify what kinds of investments and opportunities that NSF and other federal agencies need to be considering in the five to 10 to 20-year timeframe. We want your insight into what sort of partnerships NSF and other agencies ought to be considering to help facilitate making sure that we maximize the opportunity with understanding biological phenomena at continental scale. Yeah, that's very helpful. Well, we have some questions before and actually, I'm going to call Bala to ask the next question. So thank you. Okay, hi. Hi, Bala. Hi, how are you? Good. Okay, our next question is, how did or will NSF biology related programs and other programs use previous reports like this in specifically in developing new initiatives? So, I'm not sure I could answer that, to be honest, except to say that previous National Academy studies have had a very large impact on NSF program development. Whether it's in areas like neon, it had a huge impact on NSF rethinking and reorganizing the National Ecological Observatory Network. The NSF report on metagenomics had a huge impact on focusing NSF's attention on microbiome research. You know, when I first came to NSF 23 and a half years ago, I was the token microbiologist and it's kind of, says something very interesting that the person who's talking to you about understanding biology at continental scale came to NSF focused on the smallest organisms. But, you know, the fact is that the continental scale biology, the organisms that may have the largest impact on changes at continental scale may be the smallest organisms because these are organisms that have a huge impact on producing and consuming, for example, atmospheric gases like CO2 and methane, nitrous oxide, dinitrogen gas. You know, the only organisms that can assimilate dinitrogen and convert it into organic material are microorganisms. So, I think these reports have a very large impact. You know, to be honest, it's hard to predict, but let's just say NSF doesn't, especially the biology directorate, doesn't fund a lot of national academy studies. We only seek out that kind of input. Frankly, they're quite expensive. You know, this study is costing NSF more than $700,000 in U.S. taxpayer money. And so we only do it when we feel it's very important to have this high level expert impact to help us really develop an architectural plan for a programmatic future. Thank you so much. Do you have a follow-up question or not? If not, we'll come to the next one. No, I don't. I thought your ideas, tools, people from work was really helpful. Yeah. So those of you who are old as a meme will remember that was actually Rita Caldwell's conceptual framework for the National Science Foundation when she was the NSF director, you know, people, ideas, and tools. I sort of reverse the order there because really I think what will be the most fruitful focus for this group is probably going to be the ideas, the questions, and how can they be framed and what do we need to answer those questions? Great. Thank you. Chelsea, could you ask the next one? Sure. I think you might have already answered it though, Matt. The next question that we had was what are the, what are some successful examples of previous National Academy reports that have been used by NSF in developing new initiatives? And I believe in your previous answer, you talked a little bit about neon and metagenetics. Yeah, metagenomics. There's also, you know, been a couple of reports from the board on polar research, I believe. And we, you know, like I said, we don't fund a lot of National Academy studies. We only really make that investment when there's, we see there's a need and the timing is right. But I encourage you all to have a look at those formal reports. There's also one on the role of theory in biological science. I think one of the challenges that in my experience, those folks who do continental scale work, one of the challenges they have is an over focus on the geochemistry part of the story. And an under focus on biological phenomena. And what we're really looking from you is understanding the biology at continental scale. What do we need, you know, to make the big advances there, both in terms of science and in terms of our society? Thank you. That's great. Any follow up? Okay, great. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Jack. Matt, mine's more along the lines of trying to get a handle on how what NSF has learned from leading these large scale initiatives, what were the pain points? What were the policy issues that contextualized the development of those programs? Right, you know, we don't exist in a vacuum research and never exist in a vacuum. So if we were designing something at a continental scale or thinking about how to implement work at a continental scale, understanding what went wrong or what went right previously, right? Especially with something like neon, which you and I have a history with. And then what policy decisions now should be taken into consideration when building these kinds of programs? So I would caution the committee about worrying too much about policy. Policy changes, right, with the administration. And so I think over time NSF has learned how to partner with the National Academy on these studies. And for example, from NSF's perspective, there's a lot of oversight that goes into our decision to fund a study that did not used to take place. So we have a whole committee that reviews any of, you know, any of our directorates' desires to support a National Academy study. Really, they have to be approved at the highest levels, ultimately, of NSF. And so we have learned within NSF, NSF is, while we're a small government agency, it never ceases to amaze me how challenging it is for the left hand to know what the right hand is doing. And so we've learned to not step on our own feet, I think, over time, especially with respect to supporting things like an NRC, a National Academy study. And so, you know, I would also caution you not to, on the one hand, be completely unrealistic about, you know, financial investments. You know, we're not going to fill the skies with, you know, another 1,000 satellites to monitor the Earth system, right? We don't have, we need money to feed people on Earth too. But on the other hand, don't be overly concerned about cost. You know, we want you to think bold in a sensible way. And so if that's going to require investment, I mean, I can tell you, when I came to NSF 23 years ago, I never would have imagined that NSF would fund a piece of biological infrastructure that costs close to half a billion dollars, which is what building neon costs. And so I think it is important to think boldly and identify where the needs really are for us to understand what we need to, to ensure, you know, the future health needs of our country from public health perspective, the future economic needs of our country, and certainly the future understanding from a scientific perspective. So no small tasks then. That's why we have you, Jack. You know how to think big. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. You need your next question. I hope it's okay for ask another question first that is not in the list. Okay, that's fine. Yeah. Is that okay? So one term that you have been using consistently is continental scale biology. I know this is going to sound naive, but I wonder how should the committee define or interpret this term because I think it's something that we all may have an idea of what it is, but what ideas should we have when we think about this report? Well, I think what we want you to do in part is to help us to think broadly and help us understand how NSF should be thinking about continental scale biology. I mean, certainly we know about phenomena like teleconnections in which, you know, forest transpiration rates in the West as they change have an impact on primary productivity in the East part of the continent, right? These kinds of phenomena have been those identified from our macro system biology and neon enabled science program. But you know, there's lots of impacts that are happening at continental scale so that if plants are blooming at earlier times, it has an impact on their pollinators. If their pollinators are emerging at a different time, it has an impact on the plants. And this can impact, you know, entire biomes of where forest will move, where agriculture will be fertile in the future, where, you know, new diseases might emerge. So really, continental scale isn't just thinking about continental scale. Also, it's thinking about connecting scales, right? From organism behavior and biomolecule synthesis on up through the way life history changes in populations to community level interactions, to ecosystem, you know, impacts and ecosystem services. And then getting beyond individual ecosystems to interactions between ecosystems. But those interactions are also dependent on these local scale interactions. Some people, I think, have been concerned that scientific advances in areas like remote sensing are somehow going to make other types of studies, ground based studies, for example, obsolete. And I'm quite certain that's far from the truth. And, you know, the connection between studies at different scales and how to do them properly and what's needed to do them properly is a very important part of the vision you're going to explore. Thank you. This was very good. I think in the next person asking a question, let me see this keep jumping. I'm interested in any kind of theoretical perspective to be reflected in this report. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, identifying new theoretical foundations or new theory that needs to be developed to understand continental scale biological phenomena. That's certainly part of it, you know, sometimes in my long tenure at NSF, I've encountered people that think great biological discoveries always happen by investing in theory driven research. Others who think biological driven discoveries happen by investing in technology driven research. And the truth from my perspective is that both are essential and complementary. Yeah. Thank you so much. Scott, I saw you have questions on the sheet. Also, before you log on, the committee member had a brief introduction to just your name and affiliation. So before you answer the questions. Okay, yeah, I'm Scott Gatz. I'm a professor at Northern Arizona University and sorry to join a little bit later had some connectivity issues. Hi Scott. I'm enjoying this. The next question is, I think you actually mostly already answered it, but would you like us to identify data and knowledge gaps across scales and point out new techniques or approaches to link scales. And I think you just addressed that. Yeah, so the answer is yes. I can I can be concise for once. The question is the best way to go about that, but I guess that's our, that's our task. I will say you mentioned those Jedi light are on the space station. I'm involved with that. There's a whole bunch of other satellite missions in the pipeline already. You're probably aware of. Yeah. So there will be lots to leverage there. And I think there's other people on this committee who are knowledgeable of those as well. Right. And the challenge Scott from my perspective is how can that information be used to understand biology. Yep. Yep. Agreed. And I can think of several ways off the bat. Yeah, we can talk about it. Any other questions from the committee members. You can raise your hand now. Or just talk Stephanie. Thank you. Yeah, I'm. Matt. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Always. I was, I was very interested to hear you. Thinking about some of the ways that continental scale biology can relate to the bio economy. Clearly this has been a national priority for quite some time in many different forms. And right now we have the new directorate technology innovations and partnerships. That is just standing up. So clearly, so there's a comment here, which is that I think that the committee will be interested in, in thinking about that more broadly. And I wonder if there's anything that you would want to say more specifically about the sorts of activities. That you think that we should be aware of as the new directorate is coming online or other things associated with bio economy might be active at NSL or, or elsewhere. I don't know. I can't really say anything specific related to activities in our new directorate, the technology innovation and partnerships tip. For one thing, you know, its funding is, is ramping up over time, we hope. And it's begun with a big, you know, a good portion of the increased NSS budget is going to help build that directorate. But I do think we in the bio directorate have been working very hard at trying to help tip the, our colleagues in tip understand all the different ways that biology has applications that, you know, provide new opportunities. So for example, when they think of biology again, they, they immediately want to go to biotechnology. That's, that's an obvious low hanging fruit, so to speak, to invest in. But they wouldn't necessarily think about conservation. Right. Conservation is a really, really important aspect of applied biology. And, you know, when you think about what makes our nation wealthy. Okay, if you, if you spend much time in other parts of the world, you'll see one of the things that really makes it, it's not, it's not that everybody's holding cell phones. You know, you can go to lots of developing countries and everybody has a cell phone. But what makes our country wealthy is the incredible amount of natural resources and land and public space that are being conserved and that we're trying to conserve more. Right. And so we have a new partnership in the bio directorate with the Paul Allen Foundation for, it's a partnership to support advances in conservation science. And, and so we're, we're talking with TIP, our partners in TIP and, and, and, and trying to help them understand why things like that are, are areas of potential interest for, for NSF's applied biology investment. So when we think about phenomena, biological phenomena and continental scale, you know, you could, you can certainly see how conservation issues. And, you know, I don't know if you've, you've heard the expression, I think it's something like 30 at 30. Right. 30% of the land would be under conservation by 2030. That, that will have a very big impact on, on continental scale biology. Paula, you have your hand up. Yeah, I just wanted to kind of jump off of a couple partnerships you mentioned. So this recent foundation partnership, and then you were sort of hinting at disease ecology. And this was a, something that came up in our initial discussions around partnerships with other agencies and kind of cross agency collaborations. And I'm wondering if you see that as within our purview in kind of making future recommendations. Yeah, I certainly first, I'd encourage you to explore the amount of interaction and collaboration that goes on. You know, the federal government's a very big thing, right? Unfortunately, it's not a new big thing. It's not the latest big thing. It's a big thing that's been around for a long time. And so even though NSF does partner with the USDA and with NIH in various ways and with NASA, as well as with private foundations. And I'm really speaking particularly of the biology directorate. And we also even have partnerships with science agencies and other countries, right? With partners in Brazil and in China and South Africa. And so I would encourage you to understand what the current scope of some of these are in areas like ecology and evolution of infectious disease or biodiversity on a changing planet. Some examples in which we have a lot of partnership. But also to think what does make sense from the perspective of understanding continental scale biology to have economies of scale in collaboration between agencies and partnerships between agencies. There's always a challenge in Washington, D.C. for research dollars. And so the extent to which agencies can cooperate and collaborate to provide what you folks, what scientists need, what the nation needs in terms of investment helps us all. Great. Any other questions from other community members? Oh, she hit. Yeah, so I had as often the case for me, somewhat abstract question, but you know, I was thinking if you think about our charge, which is, you know, research at multiple scales, you could ask that about how research is conducted at multiple scales. And I was thinking, you know, I'm president of the U.S.A. right now, and the last time I went to the meeting, it just was a reminder to me how you have the individuals studying an endangered salamander in some temporary pond, some place. And they have teams of researchers working on, you know, remote sensing and eddy flux towers and so forth. And I don't see, you know, I feel that there is the possibility that the individual researcher might have some interesting insights, especially now that they can download this data, these data from places like neon and the tools that ISO will provide and so forth, or easel, as you say. And I was wondering if I look at the NSF funding patterns, and you sort of, do you feel that they are actually structured in a way that doesn't facilitate the charge of the committee in that, you know, there are people who want to do a systematic revision of the hummingbirds will go to this particular place, people who want to study large-scale things will go to other panels or look for these occasional RFPs that come out looking for multi-institutional multi-instituted, it won't actually facilitate the idea that we could have, you know, very large-scale people looking at tiny things and people looking at tiny things start to look at big things. It's a bit abstract, but I was wondering what you thought about that. So I'm not sure if there's a question there, Shahid, or just some thought-provoking thoughts. That's the story of my life. I'll try to make a question now. So what I was asking is, do you think that the current structure of NSF is going to actually be an impediment to, you know, the idea of facilitating continental research? So I'm really glad you asked that in that way, because then I get to use one of my most favorite sayings that people like Stephanie and others have heard me say many times, which is the great thing about NSF is, you know, we do 85% to 90% of what we do very well, and we spend 50% of our time figuring out how to do the rest better. Okay? And so NSF, it's hard for me to think of a more dynamic agency or organization. You know, that funds research than NSF. We're always evaluating what we're doing. We're always trying to understand whether the way we're positioned is providing the most we can to the community, because as good as I think we do at providing opportunities to the community for funding, given our small budget, the fact is the people we fund squeeze blood out of a turnip. And, you know, we give them probably less than half of what they need, and they produce amazing results with taxpayer money. I like to tell my family, all of whom are non-scientists, that their tax dollars that go to NSF are some of the best spent tax dollars that there are because of this tremendous efficiency provided by mostly university-based researchers. And so we are constantly asking ourselves, Shahid, can we do it better? Can we organize ourselves better? We absolutely encourage you to look at that question as well. We'd love to hear the...we know what the insights are from an insider's perspective. And NSF also very, very strongly believes in bringing in outside advice. That's why all of our directorates have external advisory committees, and why all of our divisions every four years undergo what we call a committee of visitors, where we bring people in to give us external advice. So, I mean, you know, we're nothing without you, right? Thanks, Matt. Yeah, thank you so much. We're almost all run out of time. Cliff, you have any other things to say before we close this session? I don't think so. I would like to very much thank you, Matt, for the presentation and the committee for the discussion. And for those of you who have noticed, Chelsea has been taking terrific notes on our questions, which I'm sure the committee will find helpful. And one other question or comment I would make to Matt is if the committee has additional questions that we can email to you, I hope absolutely any way I can help. Please let me know. Any time, you know, you'd like to provide an opportunity for me or NSF, other NSF staff to listen in to things going on on the committee where, you know, we're very, very interested in what you're doing. We recognize the independent nature of, you know, of what's going on. But, you know, we it's a partnership, you know, so Great. Thank you so much again, Matt, for your really insightful, informative presentation and also very, very helpful answers to our questions and and also appreciate your willingness to continue answer our questions or provide the information that we need. So thanks again and yeah. Thanks, Jack. Thanks, Cliff. And again, thanks to everybody on the committee for your time in this effort. We really appreciate it. Yeah, for the committee will log out here, but we will go to another zoom link and on the program book that send you. Okay. All right. Yeah.