 Welcome to the workshop on leadership in STEM fields. My name is Jose Fuentes. I am with the Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science at the Pennsylvania State University. I am a faculty member. And also I chair a committee at the National Science Foundation, which is called SEALS. This virtual workshop is designed to bring together leaders who have ample experiences in increasing the participation of historically underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We have organized the workshop to include three different days. And each day we will have different topics of discussion. We will have also different presenters. And so if you can come to all the days, we greatly appreciate that. But if not, please do the best you can to come to any day of interest. We have a web page where all the details will be shared in advance of each day of the workshop. I need to acknowledge that this workshop is supported by the National Science Foundation and my co-chair, Lydia Villacomarov. And I are supposed to develop a report based on this workshop that we are going to do next. Next slide, please. On behalf of the full workshop organizing committee, I welcome you to this workshop. The organizers of this committee include myself, Lydia Villacomarov. Willie Pearson, John Slaughter. And we are so delighted that you are taking time to discuss some very important ideas here with us. And Lydia, in a moment, will share with all of us the objectives of the workshop. Next slide. And so we have a very busy agenda for today. And we hope to address three very important topics. For the first session, we're going to discuss the earlier leaders in a stem from URGs. The second session will deal with leaders in education. And then the third session will deal with leaders in the corporate world and foundations. At the end of these three sessions, we're going to have a plenary session. And hopefully all of us will be able to participate in whatever way we can. And one last comment I wish to mention to all of you is that we, of course, encourage and welcome all the comments you may have for the workshop or during the sessions that we have prepared for you. But in case you come up with some questions or some ideas after we are done with those sessions, please do not hesitate to direct your inquiries or comments to Lydia and myself. We will include your input in the report that we are going to prepare for the National Science Foundation. And with this introductory remarks, I wish now to ask Lydia to give us the details about the objectives of the workshop. Thank you, Jose. It's a great pleasure to have all of you here today. We began this idea, in part, inspired by the work of the SEAS Committee. It is a committee which every two years must give a report to the Congress on the state of affairs for individuals from underrepresented groups, particularly in the sciences. And the theme of the current report is leadership, requesting that NSF consider some bold moves to deal with leadership in STEM so that individuals from underrepresented groups can be more fully incorporated into this national endeavor, that we don't lose their talents. And so as we were talking about this as an organizing committee, it occurred to us that there was another piece that needed to be addressed. And that is that the idea of role models in leadership. It's very clear now that role models are critically important in inspiring young people to consider paths of various sorts. And so if individuals don't see somebody who looks like them, it's much harder to envision themselves in that role. For myself, this lesson became very clear when my nephew, who was four at the time, met his mother, of course he knew, and he met his two aunts for the first time. At the end of that day, he went to his mother and he said, oh, mom, I can't be a scientist and I can't be a lawyer and I can't be a banker because those are girls' jobs. So children are making choices before they even know the choices exist. And so if we want more of us to be represented in the rooms where decisions are made, which makes sense for a variety of reasons, we need to let people know that we are there. And so part of what we hope to gain from this workshop is stories and ways in which those stories can be disseminated in a more general way. So in future sessions, we hope to have representatives from media and the creative arts to help us strategize about how this might be done. So in today's session, part of what we'll be doing is examining the pathway of some of the very early leaders. Those pioneers who were the first to do something. It speaks to the history of this nation that those firsts are still with us. The other thing we want to do is to explore programs. What programs might we want to identify, highlight, copy, scale so that they are more widely available to a bigger portion of the population? And finally, what are those model programs and what are the things about them that can be transported to other institutions and what are things that are unique to the particular site? We also want to be sure that we help clarify this misconception that is held by too many that merit and diversity are opposing terms that they cannot coexist. We have seen this play out most recently in the discussion of a possible lectureship at MIT, which is now being done at Princeton. And finally, we wish to, we hope to garner from this workshop and your suggestions what policies we might recommend to not just this National Science Foundation, but many of the federal agencies at universities and so forth that can help accelerate the progress that we've made. We have made progress. There are more of us here today than there were 30, 40, 50, 100 years ago in positions of leadership, but progress has been slow. And if we were to continue at the rate at which we're going now, we won't ever be where we want to be. And so we need to continue the search to find an inflection point and we hope that this workshop will do that.