 Hello, I'm Dr. Eric Green, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the United States National Institutes of Health, or NIH. Our institute is responsible for leading NIH's contribution to the Human Heredity and Health in Africa project, or H3Africa. I was delighted to come to AFRICON two previous occasions to participate in key meetings associated with what has now become the H3Africa project, but my schedule this month precluded my travel there to attend this meeting, and for that, I'm very sorry. However, I am certain that Dr. Jane Peterson, NHGRI's Project Director for H3Africa, and Dr. Mark Geyer, the NHGRI Deputy Director and also Director of our Extramural Research Program, will effectively represent this important project and will be extremely helpful to you. As you probably know, H3Africa is a partnership among the African Society of Human Genetics, the NIH, and the Wellcome Trust, a global charity based in the United Kingdom. More than half of the NIH contribution comes from something called the NIH Common Fund, a program that supports multidisciplinary programs. NIH Common Fund projects aim to break down key roadblocks in biomedical research that impede basic scientific discoveries and their translation to clinical advances. NIH Common Fund projects also act as catalysts by advancing work in emerging fields such as genomics. At this time, the NIH Common Fund Global Health Initiative supports biomedical research and training through two programs, H3Africa and the Medical Education Partnership Initiative, also called MEPI. In addition to NIH Common Fund support, H3Africa is further supported by several institutes and centers at NIH, including the NHGRI, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the NIH Office of AIDS Research, and the NIH Fogarty International Center. Our goal for H3Africa is both simple and profound. We hope to help African researchers develop a sustainable, collaborative research enterprise that will improve health in Africa. Through H3Africa, we plan to support world-class research and infrastructure building projects with an emphasis on using contemporary research approaches to study the genomic and environmental determinants of common diseases. The heritage of all people has been traced to Africa. Much can be learned about all human populations in the world by studying African populations. Furthermore, many previous studies, including the International HapMap Project, have shown that Africans have the greatest amount of genetic variation. Studying the population with the greatest genetic variability should provide insights about the role of genetics in health and disease for all people, including Africans themselves. While the competition for NIH funding is fierce, global health is too important to ignore. NIH remains profoundly interested in funding good science in Africa, where there is tremendous intellectual capacity, exciting scientific opportunities, and a need to improve health care. To help researchers compete for limited funding for high priority projects, NIH often conducts technical information sessions, like the one you are now attending. I urge you to take full advantage of this meeting and to ask every question you may have about the research and infrastructure building that NIH seeks to support, including questions about the grant process, proposal writing, and grants administration. When you sit down to write your grant application, which takes an enormous amount of time and effort, I want you to have all the information that you need. You are, of course, welcome to continue asking questions after the meeting by email and phone. And please be sure to visit the H3Africa website, h3africa.org, for updates and contact information. NIH is committed to supporting genetics and genomics research, as well as training and infrastructure building in Africa. Through this work, the African scientific community will become empowered to make important breakthroughs about many diseases, from understanding their causes to improve diagnostics and treatments. We look forward to building enduring partnerships with you, our African scientific colleagues. Thank you, and good luck, and I hope that you have a productive meeting.