 Alright everyone, good afternoon and welcome. For those of you whom I've not met, my name is Nathan Meyer. I'm Assistant Vice Chancellor for Research in the Office of Research and Economic Development, or ORED at Nebraska. It's my pleasure to moderate today's virtual session, Stage 2, related to the process to identify a set of grand challenge themes for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A couple housekeeping items before we get started. We'd ask that everyone, if you don't have a speaking role, that you please mute your mics and your cameras to help reduce background noise and to maximize bandwidth for the presenters today. We'd also ask that you set your Zoom view to the speaker view so that you're able to readily see the individual who's speaking at any given time. We do plan to have a question and answer session at the end of today's dialogue. We will not be monitoring the chat box, however, for questions. So if you do have questions of today's panelists, we'd ask that you write those in an email and send them to UNL Research, all one string, UNLresearch at UNL.edu. So thanks again for joining us today. We have a 60-minute session today designed to help stretch our collective thinking about some of the contexts for framing potential grand challenges and grand challenge themes at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. So our initial convening was held on Friday afternoon and it involved nearly 300 individuals from 195 distinct units across campus and we even had some external emeriti friends of the University. So it was really, really exciting to see all of that great momentum and we hope to continue that here today. So the sort of focus of today's session is to hear from a purposeful sample of speakers who will share some unique insights that can inform the work we do to imagine grand challenge themes pursued across our campus through 2025 and beyond. And we also want to ask you for some input. We want you to share with us some additional resources that will be important for our campus community to consider over the next few weeks. So just like on Friday, before I do a quick rundown of today's agenda, I wanted to share this slide with everyone and some of you may remember this from last Friday. Some of you may have forgotten it. But during the last couple weeks, several people have reached out and asked me, you know, what's a grand challenge? What's a grand challenge theme? So here's how I'm approaching grand challenge themes as we embark on this journey to flesh out our portfolio themes for campus over the next few weeks. So I really perceive a grand challenge theme as a problem or an opportunity or an issue space that if addressed is going to positively impact, you know, a significant number of people, society in general, it's going to be significant in scope result from complex causes and can be solved only by a combination of innovative interdisciplinary approaches. So that's what I think about when I think about grand challenge themes and the work that we're going to do together the next few weeks. So on to today's agenda. This afternoon, you're going to hear from representatives of the Bureau of Sociological Research, the Bureau of Business Research, the Nebraska Rural Poll and Nebraska Extension. So I asked each of today's speakers to share salient findings from their recent work. A lot of them have some longitudinal work. They've been sort of surveying the state, talking to Nebraskans, engaging Nebraskans for a very, very long time, obviously extension since our earliest days as a university. So I asked each of them to say, what do you all know? What have you found recently that everyone on campus needs to know? I also told them that they could be provocative in terms of the information or the data that they share with us today. So I hope you're ready for that. And I hope you remember that I gave you a fair warning. We'll see how provocative our colleagues get. Just a couple comments about today's speakers. So again, they're intended to represent a purposeful sample of local on campus resources available to help inform our collective thinking about grand challenge themes. Now that said, they are by no means intended to represent an exclusive or an exhaustive list of such resources. Our intent today was really just to give you a flavor of groups with some compelling evidence to share folks who have information on the shelf and connections in the greater community insights that can inform our work over the next few weeks. It truly would have been impossible for us to highlight all the excellent resources on campus and beyond that might help us think in this way. So at the end of the talks, we're going to share a link where you can contribute your suggestions and point us to some additional resources that we can curate and post to help make the broader community aware of issues, of reports of publications, et cetera, that really the community should take into consideration as we think about grand challenges over the next few weeks. And then finally, after we hear from each of today's speakers, we are going to moderate, like I said, a question and answer session. We're not monitoring the chat box for questions. So if you have questions that you want to pose to today's speakers, please send those via email to UNL research at UNL.edu. So with that said, I'm ready to turn the mic over or the camera, whatever you call these platforms in Zoom, over to today's first speaker, who is Jolene Smith, Jolene's a faculty member in the Department of Sociology. She's also the director of the Bureau of Sociological Research, and she's here today on the line as a representative bozer. So Jolene over to you. Excellent. Thank you, Nathan. I'm going to share my screen with you all. Hopefully this will work. Can you see my slides, Nathan? Yes. Okay, perfect. So as Nathan mentioned, I'm here to talk to you because I am the director of the Bureau of Sociological Research. And I wanted to start quickly just by talking a little bit about what bozer is. We are essentially a survey data collection shop that's been on campus since 1964. And Nathan wanted us to show you interesting information we've collected over time at provocative things. And unfortunately, for him, we collect a lot of data and deliver it to people on sometimes we don't get to analyze our own data. So I want to talk today about one of the major sources of data that we have, which we call NASA's. But first, I'll mention, even though we're called the Bureau of Sociological Research, we actually serve all of campus. That name is sort of a legacy we're stuck with. Because we originated out of the Sociology Department, but we're here for everybody on campus. Let's see. So the data I wanted to talk about is what's called the Nebraska Annual Social Indicator Survey or NASA's. NASA's is both for us on campus a source of existing data. It was started in 1977. And it's also a tool to collect new data. So we conduct NASA's annually, hence the name. We try to get 1000 completes annually. Up until 2008, the survey was collected by telephone. Currently, from 2009 onward, we started collecting it by mail. And we usually do it in the summer. Although if we have high demand from clients, we'll do it in the winter as well. The cool thing about NASA's, though, for our campus is that it's an omnibus design. And what that means is that the questions that make up our questionnaire come both from BOSER itself. We have a core set of questions that we see as major demographics and social indicators. And then we have client driven questionnaires, our questions. And so clients can request to put questions on to NASA's. They pay by the amount of space that they use in the formatted questionnaire. And once we click that data, they get back their questions or the data from their questions and the data from the core questions. And so this is a really neat model on campus that spreads the cost across BOSER and across all of our clients so that nobody has to pay for an entire survey. But we can all click the data that we think are important about our state. We do make that data publicly available, but we embargo it for one year so that paying clients can have a chance to use their data before it goes out to the public. But then we want to make it public so that it can have the widest impact on our state. And we've used NASA's for a variety of reasons. The state legislature has looked at NASA's data. The city of Lincoln has looked at NASA's data. Researchers have used it. Students have written theses and dissertations out of it. A whole number of things. And I am so sorry. I forgot I animated my slides. So I'll make these slides available for Nathan to be posted online after the fact. One thing to notice is that I did list the 36 core questions in the fine print there on the slide. And so those, like I said, do cover a lot of social indicators that social behavioral scientists do tend to care about a lot. So now like I said, we have these core questions and we ask these core questions at every time period. So we can go back and we can look at trends over time in our NASA's data on these questions. So for example, on this slide, we can see that an overwhelming majority of Nebraskans consistently report that they are somewhat or very satisfied living in Nebraska. That seems good. That's in the blue line. Just over half typically report that Nebraska as a state is headed in the right direction. That's the green line. And a considerably smaller portion report that the country is headed in the right direction. And that's the red line at the bottom. And interestingly, over time, we see that when larger percentages of Nebraskans think that the state is headed in the right direction, then smaller percentages of them think that the nation is heading in the right direction and vice versa. Those are sort of inverse relationships. So this is a pretty simple graph to make, but there's a lot more that we could do with this data. We could break it down by party affiliation if we had more than three to five minutes. We could look at it by urbanicity. We could look at it by any number of those other social indicators that we're also measuring. Now, one thing I wanted to point out, the question about whether or not the country is headed in the right direction is a very common question asked on a lot of national polls. A lot of political polls ask this question. And so we can compare NASA's data to what we see in those political polls. And that's what this graph does. So the NASA's data about whether or not the country is headed in the right direction is that red line at the bottom. I left it the same color so we can still see it. And the various national polls are in all the other colors. And I listed those by color on the right hand side. So you can see these are major news organizations, as well as Gallup and Pew, which are major sort of research organizations. And what you see in this graph is that in any given year, we have slight differences in those point estimates. But overall, the trends that we're seeing in NASA's data track very, very well with the trends that we see in national data as well. And I think that speaks to the quality of the methodology that we have behind NASA's. The differences that you see within point estimates across years are due to a number of different things. Most of them, I think, methodological. So, for example, we are surveying just Nebraskans, whereas most of these polls are national polls. And so they're looking at people across the country. Each of us has slightly different question wording. NASA says male, many of the others are conducted by telephone. And there's different sample designs behind these. So there's lots of methodological reasons for some of the differences. But I think the big point is that those trends track really, really well. We can also track trends over time using our client driven questions. So, for example, in 2013, 2015 and 2018, we had client questions about GLBT issues in the state of Nebraska. And some of those, as you can see, are repeated in multiple years. So the graphs that you see here show some of those results. And we've broken them out by respondents who were just from Lincoln to give us a little local picture and respondents from all of Nebraska. And there's a couple of interesting things I think we can take away from this data. So on most of the topics, we see increases in the percent who favor these different policies over time. Not surprisingly, we see that people in Lincoln are more likely to favor policies that grant rights or protections to gays and lesbians. And they're less likely to favor policies that limit those rights and protections than the people statewide. It might be surprising to some, though, that when we look statewide, over 75 percent support protection from housing and job discrimination for gays and lesbians. And 50 to 60 percent support rights related to marriage and related to adoption. So in Nebraska, if we just listen to news coverage and we listen to our elected leadership, you might not realize how much support there really is for these groups in the state, especially for the protective and family policies. And while I don't show it here, we also have a data point in Nebraska, among all Nebraskans, support for job discrimination protections for transgender individuals is also quite high. It's 81.3 percent in Lincoln and 72.6 percent statewide. Now, we can also compare these data with national measurements. So here you can see the NASA's estimates of approval. The percent of folks in Nebraska who approve same sex marriage in 2013 and 2015, that's in red. And we can compare that to estimates from the same years for Pew and Gallup. And again, there's lots of methodological differences across the different data collections from these different organizations. But what we see is that the trends are very, very similar across the data collections. We're matching the national trends very well. And the same is true for our NASA's estimates of approval for religious exemptions for businesses. So this is a question about whether businesses should be allowed to refuse services to gays and lesbians if that is in line with their religious beliefs. And I couldn't find as many measures of this in national polls, but I did find this one and you can see that it tracks very well with what NASA is showing us. So this is just a very small sample of what we have. Like I said, we have data dating back to 1977. And we have opportunities to collect new data as needed to address the grand challenges that we might identify on this campus. I also want to note just in closing here quickly that NASA's is very customizable in that we can ask different question topics, but we can also customize other things like the mode we could call people if there's a budget for that we could get them on the web. We can do larger sample sizes and we have done that at times in the past when needed. And then over the past few years we have been asking our NASA's respondents if they would like to enroll in a panel that we call Nebraska voices. We have over 700 people who have agreed to enroll in that panel and essentially they're agreeing to participate in future research as needed. And so we can use that panel to recruit samples that have very specific characteristics. For example, if you want a minority group in the Lincoln area, or if you want people from Scott's Bluff area or something like that, we can we can recruit very strategically. And Bozer has all kinds of other data collection options. We can do one off surveys for people we can do longitudinal surveys. NASA's just is sort of a homework product that we have that is very flexible and I think financially accessible to many people. So that's why we chose to focus on that. So with that I have included our contact information. If you want to contact us, like I said, I'll give these slides to Nathan so he can post them and I will turn the mic back to Nathan. Thanks so much Jolene. That was great. Next up we're going to hear from Dr. Eric Thompson in the Bureau of Business Research. Eric is an economist in the College of Business. I don't think Dr. Thompson's been in business since 1964, but maybe he'll tell us otherwise. So Eric, are you there? Yes, can you hear me okay? Yep. Okay, I'm trying to share my screen. Okay. Is it showing up okay? Starting Yep, there's your slides. Okay, I apologize to everyone. My camera's not working, but I figure if we can go through the PowerPoint that'll cover things. So so let me just hit a few high points. So I'm an economics faculty here and also with the Bureau of Business Research, which is part of the College of Business. So we're an economic and I should say economic policy research organization. We're working, I'll give you an example here in a minute trying to identify key features and challenges for the Nebraska economy, the Great Plains, our region of the country and also the national economy. And we work a lot with other parts of UNL that it's typically because we're partnering with them on on a larger research project taking care of the economic analysis involved. Here's some things we do on a regular basis. We do have a monthly survey of 500 Nebraska businesses. It's a shorter survey, but we do gather some basic information about the businesses and can attach questions, if people would have an interest in that. Additional questions. We do a lot of work with the skills gap and labor availability. The Department of Labor I've provided a link to the website there. I'll also share these slides to Nathan so we can share them to the group. After the meeting today, we also do some economic indicators. The Nebraska Thriving Index looks at the rural areas of the state Omaha barometer where we track the progress of regional economies. You can see my contact information there. In terms of what might be a grand challenge for the Nebraska economy, I think we have a great need in the state to try to grow our upper middle class more quickly. That's really if you look at things trends in the US economy. That's really the major trend where we're not keeping up, not growing it as quickly as we might. There's a lot of advantage to that. Probably out of 2 million people, it might be possible to have 40, 60, 80,000 additional Nebraskans in the upper middle class. It's obviously going to create prosperity for them. It definitely impacts the other people in the economy because of the high demand for services. And if you actually analyze the income tax base in the state, it's the upper middle class that pays the largest share of income tax in Nebraska, not the wealthy. So it's very important in a lot of ways. It's a big hole in our economy. We just have too few high wage, high growth industries, too few of that activity going on. I've got some evidence of that I'll present here in a minute. And let me say this is an Nebraska problem, but it's actually a common problem in a lot of places, not named Denver or Minneapolis or San Francisco or Austin. So it would not just be a grand challenge for us. It would be a grand challenge for places throughout the United States. So here's what I mean in terms of weak progress for education attainment. You can see when it comes to the share of the adult population with a high school degree or higher, Nebraska is well ahead of the U.S. average. By the time you get to a bachelor's degree, we're about even. And then when you look at graduate and professional degrees, obviously that can be a lot of that highway, which upper middle class workforce we've fallen meaningfully behind. So that's one piece of evidence for the work we need to do or might benefit from growing our upper upper middle class. Here's another here's a key industry in that sector. The high, the fast growing high wage part of the U.S. economy is called the professional, scientific and technical services industry. It includes information technology. We hear a lot about that, but also other high wage high skill industries like engineering, consulting, accounting, advertising, legal services in here, social science and physical science research of all sorts. If you look at that sector it nationally, it's about up to six and a half percent of employment manufacturing accounts for maybe 10% of employment. I would bet in 1520 years, there might be more jobs in this sector than there are in manufacturing in the country. So to the economy, you can see in a recent 10 year period it grew by more than 15% nationally and Nebraska it only grew about 5%. So that's what I mean when I say we're not keeping up in this important part of the economy. By the way, if you looked at overall job growth during that period, Nebraska would actually be a little faster than the United States. So it's this sector where we're falling behind not in general. You can look at the average weekly wages in this professional scientific and technical services, about 70% above the all industry average. So we could benefit from doing a lot better in this high wage, high growth industry. This just shows you it's kind of broad-based based on a report we did recently. These are the four sectors of the Nebraska professional, scientific and technical service industry that we can break out separately in the data. And you can see we're behind in all of them. Each one of them is a smaller share of our economy than it is nationally. So a bit of a missed opportunity there, something we can work on going forward to help grow our upper middle class. And it has it leads to a different policy agenda than your typical effort to grow manufacturing. That's important too, obviously. There's a great emphasis on preparation of students before they enter college. I know there's a lot of people around campus working on that. We can grow our upper middle class through post-graduate degrees and certificate programs. That's something a lot of people at the university are really focused on right now. It does tend to be a little bit of an urban biased policy approach. These industries tend to grow fastest in our cities. And so it would mean emphasizing growth certainly in Omaha, but perhaps Lincoln, Kearney, a few other places a little bit more than we do. Consumer amenities are very critical here. And then it's not all about just these high-waith and high-wage jobs. People can also reach the upper middle class and beyond through entrepreneurship. Financial education can be very important. Sometimes people can reach the upper middle class later in life because they've been very successful with savings and investment early in life. So if you look at these different sectors, there's folks all over campus working on these issues. And I think it is a potential area, a focus area, a potential grand challenge we might examine both for our state and the country as a whole. That's all I had, Nathan. All right, Eric. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. So Eric, if you'd take a moment and please stop sharing your screen, that will enable Becky to vote, who's today's speaker representative from the rural poll to share her and share her slides. Becky is the manager of survey research in the Department of Agricultural Economics. Excuse me. And as I said, she's here today as the representative for Nebraska's rural poll, which, correct me if I'm wrong, Becky just celebrated or recently celebrated is 25th year. Correct. Yep. Yep. So today, thanks, Nathan. Today, I'm going to just share a brief overview of the poll and some of our data findings so that you can highlight what is available from us and what we've been learning about rural Nebraska. So first of all, as Nathan just mentioned, we it was started in 1996. So we're celebrating our 25th year this year. So we're not quite as established as NASA's. But you'll find a lot of little similarities here too. Over the past 24 years because we're collecting the 25th year currently. Over the past 24 years, we've gathered input from over 64,000 non-metropolitan Nebraskans. We've produced a little over 100 reports that have covered roughly 31 unique topics. And those are pretty broad topic areas. There's a lot of specificity within those as well. And just a few examples of topics. We have taxes, agriculture, education, immigration, a whole host of different topics we've covered. The real poll was started, though, to give leaders a better understanding of the issues and challenges and concerns of rural Nebraskans. So it's a mail survey that is sent out in the spring every year to about 7,000 to 7,000 randomly selected households in 86 counties across the state. This map shows that it's basically the non- metropolitan counties. However, the one shaded in the darker yellow are technically metropolitan counties, but we still include them in our sample. So the only ones we don't include are those green ones that are part of the Omaha and Lincoln area. And the data collection happens each year in the spring in March and April. So we're just finishing the data entry of that right now. Every year, about half of our survey similar to NASA kind of has core questions that are included to track our trends and changes over time. And those include questions about their community, perceptions about their community, and the services provided as well as questions about their respondents general well-being. So the next slides are some examples of some of the trends we've seen over time. This first one is on well-being. The two kind of core questions we look at for well-being every year is we ask, do you feel you're better or worse off compared to five years ago? And do you feel you'll be better or worse off 10 years from now? So as you can see from these lines, these are the percent of people answering better or much better off or better off. And you can see a general upward trend over time. And in fact, last year, we had reached the highest level of optimism that we've had across all years of our study. But however, you can do see that there are some dips that occur over time. It's not obviously a flat progression there. So this is really unique about us because our data can show how well-being is impacted by various events. If there's weather going on, that particular year policy changes economic conditions, we can really view and see how that impacted well-being that particular year. Like last year, we mailed out right after the flooding and blizzard events happening across the state. And we still did see that record level optimism, which was maybe surprising to some. This year, we're mailing out during a pandemic. So we'll see how the data shakes out this year. So again, we can just see how those are impacted by different events. And another quick example is just some satisfaction with community services. And we've seen a general decline, slight decline in satisfaction with different social services in the community, such as nursing home care, medical services, senior centers and mental health services. So those are important trends for community leaders to be aware of. But I want to do point out that even though we do see some general declines in some services across the community, overall, residents have very generally been positive about their communities. They have positive views about their community and view them as good places to live. So in addition to those trends, we're also able to explore perceptions and opinions about other topics, like I mentioned some of the examples I mentioned earlier. Each year, we solicit topics from people across the state and ask them what we should ask questions about that particular year. And then our team decides and we usually include two or three new topic areas every year. And with our large sample size, we're also able to look at data by various characteristics as well. We have five multi-county regions that we look at the data by, by community size and then various demographic characteristics. So this is just one quick example of how broadband service is very important out in rural Nebraska. It's a very important issue. And this shows example of how people living in or near the smallest communities are more likely to report significant limitations with being able to stream online video content as compared to people living in the larger community sizes. So we're able to really hone in and see where some of these specific issues are popping up. In addition to that, over our 25 years, we've been able to periodically return to topics to see if any changes have occurred over various intervals of time. So one example is between 2008 and 2013, we saw some sizable changes in opinions about climate issues. And again, I'm going to go real quick with this and these slides will be shared if you're wanting to look at specific ones here. And then last year too, we saw some, we reported some dramatic shifts and perceptions of higher education compared to when we had asked it prior in 2015. So we have able to look at things in different intervals of time to dive into a little bit of that education too. What's been interesting is even though we saw the decline in some of the perceptions of higher education, we still every year see how education level is impact many of our other variables. People with higher education levels every year report higher levels of satisfaction with their own well-being and with their community. So this was just again, just a snippet of our data just to show you some samples of what we can do. All reports are found online. They are organized by either topic or by specific year. If you're looking at wanting to see what a specific year, the information was gathered. Also want to share that we have a history of partnering with other faculty members. When we ask questions about other topics, if our team members don't have that expertise or the knowledge about that topic, we have typically pulled in a faculty member that does have that expertise to work with our team that year. And they help us develop our questions and analyze the data and report that at the end as well. So we have done that. We've worked with faculty in some departments such as sociology, the public policy center, Nebraska Business Development Center, natural resources. And we currently have a new team member that has joined this year from UNO. So we work across the systems as well. And we are willing to share our data with others who would like to analyze it for their own research purposes too. So here is our contact information. These are current, the current core team of the role pool. Many of the faculty are within the ag economics department. We also have L.J. McElravy who's with the ag leadership group. And as Steve Schultz again is with UNO and Jason Weigel is a CVI like community vitality initiative educator, but also a role sociology background. So any of us can be contacted for further information or if you have ideas about different topics that you think we should include in the role pool. We do not charge for questions to be included in the role pool. And we look forward to hopefully forming new collaborations with many of you. Thanks so much Becky. So as Becky said and others have said, Jolene, Eric, they're willing to share their slides. So we will post a recording of today's session along with copies of their slides to the Grand Challenges website. We'll probably get that done tomorrow and be sure to share all that information with you as a follow up information as well. So next up, I'm happy to say that we have Dave Varner, Associate Director and Associate Dean of Nebraska Extension on the line. Dave and his colleagues in extension are on the ground reaching out across our statewide campus every single day. So I'm happy for Dave to share with us about some of the work, some of the issues going on in extension. Good afternoon and thank you, Nathan. What's a pleasure to be with you today. What I'm planning to share is a brief overview of the Nebraska Extension issue team collaborative model. I believe there's some relevance and perhaps some insights that may offer us assistance as we look to identify the Grand Challenges within the UNL discussion. To begin with, I thought I'd just reach back a few years to a Nebraska Extension, had a discussion about excellence and what we think about as we do our work every day out and across Nebraska. We are one of the three land grant missions at UNL. Our informal education engages youth, adults, families, organizations, businesses and communities throughout the state. Really, we're about engaging people in Nebraska with research-based information and education that helps to improve their lives. So these are just some of the words and there's a lot more behind this excellence conversation. These are some of the things that we think about every day as we move forward with our organization. So about four years ago, the spring of 2016, we had a conversation about a collaborative model that would help us put the Nebraska Extension excellence to work as we worked at our mission area across the state. So we identify, we decided to focus on the issues for Nebraskans. So issues as we define them were opportunities, problems or challenges that required an interdisciplinary approach. And I'll talk more about that in just a moment. They also needed to be important to Nebraska. Nebraskans in many cases, like groundwater quality, for example, beyond Nebraska as well. We wanted them to be actionable. So we looked at this three to five year window and thought about how would we know if we were successful down the road? We also felt Nebraska Extension had to be uniquely positioned and resourced to address these issues. And of course, we wanted statewide deliverables at the end of the day. This was a process that we expected to evolve over time. And so we identified 18 issue teams to begin with. One of those teams has dissolved recently. Another couple of the teams have combined. And as we speak, we are thinking about what the next version of issue teams looks like with the Nebraska Extension. What does that 2.0 version look like? So, as we navigated our issue team work, there were three overarching principles that we wanted to re-enact as the extension work for over a century, that we engage our stakeholders across the state. And so this meant visiting with our Extension Board members, our volunteers, our community leaders, our existing and future partners in programming to help identify what these emerging issues are that were right for Nebraska Extension to embrace and pursue. At the same time, we asked the same question of our faculty and staff. And collectively, collaboratively, we identified the 18 issues I'll share here in just a moment that we pursued. The being demand-driven was exceptionally important for us. Interdisciplinary, we had worked in silos, if you will, in discipline-based teams for a long time. And as we looked at these complex, wicked issues that we aspire to address, it became clear that we needed expertise from a variety of areas. We needed collaboration. We need a collective effort from faculty across disciplines to solve and make progress with these issues. And finally, partner development. And this is one that was so important to us as well because it was inviting external partners to be a part of the co-creation, the co-solutions for some of these issues. And so this meant reaching out to current partner in organizations and folks that we hadn't partnered with before because we felt like that would add to our capacity and the potential for success in this movement. So this is a look at a stakeholder piece that we developed to just highlight these 18 issue teams that we've been working on within for the last four years. If you look in the upper left-hand corner, you'll see a few green icons there. Those all focus within the youth and learning child arena. So these are around learning experiences, STEM education, college and career readiness, healthy lifestyles. If you move over to the right in the blue icons, here we're addressing livable communities, entrepreneurship for youth and leadership statewide. The right icons focus on agriculture, natural resources, climate variation and environment. And then the two orange icons are about consumer access, consumer confidence and food access. So I invite you to visit this website. This is the Nebraska Extension website under impact. And every year we ask each of these issue teams to develop a two-page summary of the previous year's work. So you'll find a report for each one of these teams as you visit this website. And it'll give you a snapshot of what happened in 2019. So I was looking through this list. What I noticed is there were several teams that aligned with some of the potential grand challenges that were mentioned last Friday. There are such as food access and climate variation and children learning experiences, water and soil protection. There are a couple others maybe we should think about. One of those is living livable communities. A couple of these focus on workforce development. But I'll leave that for you to decide as you peruse the work of these teams, learn more about what they've been up to. And then I would encourage you to contact me and I would love to fit you in touch with the team leads and members of these teams to learn more about their work. This is my email address. This will be an opportunity to begin a conversation about how perhaps some extension, Nebraska Extension work around issues that we've identified might mesh and be a starting point for further conversation about grand challenges at the UNL level. But Nathan, I'm gonna stop there and thank you for the opportunity. Great, thanks so much, Dave. And as a reminder in a minute here, we'll move to question and answer. If you have questions for any of today's speakers, please feel free to send those in an email to unlresearch at unl.edu. We've got a couple, had a couple come in, hopefully a couple more come in. Before we start Q&A, I wanted to share a data set with everyone. This is, these are some data that my colleagues, Becky Zavala and Seth Berkey in the Office of Research and Economic Development have mined from the abstracts of the proposals found in new grant. So looking from fiscal year 2016 to 2020, I have a series of word clouds here that show the 250 most frequently occurring words in the abstracts of the proposals that you all submit and in some cases get funded from campus. So we have a list of common words, 429 common words are excluded from these word clouds. But I think this, these data and we'll post these online, share them in a follow-up email, sort of show some of the issues, some of the themes that occur across all of our mission areas at Nebraska. I think as we heard Chancellor Green say on Friday that we are the university for Nebraska and we really focused on the Nebraska context with the speakers today. Some have pointed opportunities, you know, for national and global impact. And certainly we don't wanna limit our grand challenge themes to Nebraska issues only. But I think you've heard today, there's a huge opportunity to really ground our work in a Nebraska context. But wanted to share these word clouds with you all. So this word cloud that I'm showing here is from all proposals coded for research, instruction or education, public service, engagement in new grant over the last five complete fiscal years. And you can see what I love about this word cloud. This is I think kind of the second time we presented this to campus. But what I love about this word cloud is that it has students in the center. Students show up as one of the recurring themes, the recurring words across all proposals submitted by faculty and staff at Nebraska. I think another term that has maybe become more prominent over the last couple of years is data. But we've seen things like health, water, science, food, agriculture, evaluation, just lots of opportunities here, youth. So this is a word cloud again from all proposals submitted, coded research, instruction and public service. This next one is a word cloud of the same missionary proposals, proposals coded for research, instruction and public services that were actually awarded to the campus. So you can see that student and data were made prominent but you can see some of the other terms that become more prominent because they're more prevalent in the abstracts of our funded projects. And then we've also broken this out subsequently by mission area. So Becky and Seth did this. So here's a word cloud again for all proposals for research that were submitted. So you can see some of the same things, some of the intensity or the recurrence changes. These are all research proposals submitted. These are the word clouds from all research proposals awarded. Again, still students at the center. I love that about these word clouds. This is a word cloud that starts to look at the instruction, polls data from the instruction proposals in New Grant. This is a word cloud, 250 most common words from all proposals coded as instruction that have been submitted at UNL from 2016 to 2020. I know I'm going through this quickly but like I said, we will share these with you after today's session. Here's the word cloud for all proposals for instruction that were actually awarded. So you can see some terms like science, like teachers, Redox makes its way in there. These terms become more prominent. And then we've done the same also for public service or engagement proposals. So this is the word cloud for all proposals for public service that have been submitted. In the last five complete fiscal years and then this is the word cloud associated with the abstracts, the heat map of the terms from the engagement or public service proposals that were funded in the last five complete fiscal years. So I just love showing this. I love seeing students at the center. Just thought this might be an opportunity to spark some thinking. It's an interesting way to see what you are up to what your colleagues are up to. And so we'll share this on the Grand Challenges website after today's event. So with that, I'd like to move to Q and A. Thus far, like I said, we only have a couple questions. If you have additional questions for today's speakers, feel free to email those to us at unleresearch at unl.edu. And the first question is for Dr. Eric Thompson. So Eric, if you want to unmute. This actually Matthew Boring from the lead center writes that he enjoyed your presentation and your research insights very much, Eric. He's wondering how we can turn the items from your slide that was labeled a different policy agenda into a concrete grand challenge or set of challenges that we're going to collectively pursue. And Matthew's observation is that each of the bullets that were on your slides, Eric, seem like somewhat independent challenges. So I don't know if you're there, Eric, if you want to unmute and comment on that question or if anyone else wants to jump in and help answer. So Eric's still muted. We'll give him another minute here to see if he comes live. Any questions that go unanswered today, we're developing a frequently answered questions page. We received so much excellent feedback on Friday. We'll be working to publish that by the end of the week on the grand challenges site. My colleague, Lisa Moplin, who's providing just great logistical support to this event has dropped a link into chat. If you are interested in suggesting additional resources. So like I said before, the resources we heard about today are representative, they're cross-sectional, they're by no means exhaustive. If there are other resources locally from campus, nationally from the federal level, from the state level, from the global level, we've created a web form where we invite you to click on the link that Lisa has shared into chat and contribute information about your top three resources. So feel free, we point to some here. There's blueprint Nebraska, the recent report about a way forward for some of the economic labor educational issues that Eric touched on in his talk. There's the NSF, 10 big ideas, sort of the big grand challenges that the National Science Foundation is pursuing over the next several years. And then if you were on the line last Friday, you heard Vice Chancellor Mike Bame talk about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs. So if you have additional resources like that, reports, books, articles, videos, things you think would be helpful to inform the community about the grand challenges we might address in the next few years from the University of Nebraska. Feel free to click on that web form, that link that Lisa dropped in the chat. Please put in your name and we're asking you to submit information about your top three resources. If you had to prioritize your top three resources that you'd like to share with your colleagues, what might those be? So we'll see. Let me see if we can bring Eric. So I'm unable to unmute Eric. So Matthew, it looks like we'll probably get to your question offline. Any other questions that anyone has today? Feel free to submit. I also want to acknowledge, I see that Chancellor Ronnie Green is on the line. Chancellor, I don't know if you're in a position to unmute or if you wanted to offer any additional observations or comments based on what you've heard today, what you've been thinking about in terms of grand challenges since last Friday, since the dialogue we had, feel free to do so. So we received another question from our colleague Francisco Munoz-Ariola and this is for all panelists. So any of you panelists who want to un-mic, feel free to do so. So Francisco's question is, so he makes an observation and then a question. So he states that the university's pool of intellectual data, tools and knowledge is vast. Do people feel like we have mechanisms and tools that can help decision makers and policy makers or stakeholders in general access this intellectual pool of resources and transform them to their benefit, be it social, economic, from an innovation perspective. Do any of today's panelists have observations, comments that way? Nathan, this is Jolene. I'll put my camera up here too. I think that is an interesting question and I'm not sure we have the infrastructure to do that well. So I think you heard each of us today say that we have data and it's available and call us or check our website or email us and get in touch with us. And I think things are happening very much in a one-off way. We recently had some conversations with the City of Lincoln about the GLBT data that I showed you and what we do is we watch for opportunities for when things are happening around us to sort of reach out to people and say, hey, we have data on that or we hope they come to us but there's no sort of centralized mechanism for people to do that on campus. And so I guess that's something that we could think about as an additional sort of resources if we could put together a dashboard or some way where we could take these public data sets and make them a little more accessible publicly and maybe perhaps even figure out ways that people could cut the data and do some basic sorts of analyses across tabs and things in the background. I think that would be a really neat service to offer on campus. Great, great observation. To offer. Jolene, go ahead, Becky. Sorry, anything. I want to offer that we do, with a real poll every year when we release our reports, we do email those out to the state senators and we have a vast mailing list across the state of community and state leaders. So we do try and get our information out there. And we do know that it is used because we do hear back from one of our professors that started the real poll, John Allen was invited to testify at a hearing a number of years ago. We've had a meeting with a governor, not the current one, but way back when when... So we've had policy leaders reach out to us. So we know that they are listening and that they are aware that we are out here and that we have data. And so we feel pretty good that they are using it. And Nathan, I agree with both of those points. I would just add that in the last year, the Institute of Ag and Natural Resources in Nebraska Extension has initiated the engagement zone coordinator model across the state. So we have started the process to double down on the land grant mission, right? To make sure we have individuals out in the field who are well connected with current and future partners and our own faculty and staff to help make these connections. So to make people aware, not through data electronically or online, but through conversations and collaboration, which obviously they all go hand in hand. Great, thanks, Dave. Thank you all, that was helpful. I'd also add, I know that there are colleagues from the Nebraska Public Policy Center on the line. We didn't highlight them in an explicit way today, but I see Dr. Mario Scallara, the PPC director is online and certainly the Public Policy Center, like Extension, like Bose or like the rule pool, this is sort of the business that they're in, day in, day out until I see the Public Policy Center as another essential partner, sort of another essential gateway to get information from campus to the community, however you want to define community. So Francisco, thank you for that question. That was an excellent one. I guess I'd like to maybe ask a question of the panelists. I'm just wondering, this was the first time maybe that some of you are hearing about the resources or what I'm calling these salient findings that you all shared with us today. Do you all, Jolene, Becky, Eric, Dave, see any opportunities for cross-pollination, collaboration across your groups going forward? Anyone want to address that? So again, I guess I'll start. I certainly see overlap in the things we're doing. We collect data from all across Nebraska, so we have data from rural areas as well. And there could be chances for us to sort of make some comparisons just simply across our data sets and things. And we have economic data because we ask some questions about economics. And so I think that the easiest collaborations would be to just sit down and say, what is your data show and what does our data show? And sort of look at things that way. All right, well, so Jolene, we'll schedule that Zoom for next week. Yeah, I got lots of time. Okay, yeah, everyone does these days, right? So I think with that said, that appears to be all the questions that have come in today. So Matthew, I know we didn't get, oh, here, we just received another one. Let's see. So Dr. Timothy Gay, professor of physics and astronomy, is asking if anyone would care to talk about the importance of two factors in selecting our grand challenges. Both in terms of the immediacy in Nebraska specificity. So I guess the two factors are the need to develop the next computational paradigm after quantum computing. Dr. Gay is saying it's certainly a grand challenge, but it's not specific to Nebraska and it's not at all an immediate problem, but it's one that's on the horizon. So I don't know if anyone has any thoughts that way, or I'm happy to offer some thoughts there. So Tim, maybe what I'll say is, right, this is the future, right? We know this emphasis on quantum computing and what comes after it is intensifying, is increasing. It's moving at a pretty steady pace. Certainly colleagues in your department from engineering, from computer science, from other campuses are sort of working together now to lay the framework and to develop Nebraska's capacity for quantum computing. They've been selected to develop the state's next EPSCOR track one research infrastructure improvement grant. So we have a team of folks, an interdisciplinary team of folks who are working to increase our capacity, our critical mass in the space. What it means for the future. I think that's still an open-ended question obviously. I know they have some research themes, some tracks they're wanting to pursue. Certainly we've also made some hires as a campus the last couple of years to add capacity in the space. I think that'll be bolstered by the EPSCOR project. And we know this is huge at NSF, at DOE. I would encourage people, if you don't know, or you want to learn more about quantum computing, sort of look at some of the Department of Energy's basic research needs reports to see what the 10 year, the 15 year, the 20 year horizon for quantum is. It's something we've got to pay attention to. It's an enabling technology, but probably both a fundamental technology and approach as well. So I don't know if that answered your question, Tim, but that's what I've got for you right now from a non-physicist, non-computer scientist, non-engineer perspective. So with that, I want to be mindful of time. I want to thank all of our panelists for taking the time to speak with us today, to share their resources, to be willing to connect in the future about collaborations, about data sharing, really appreciate it. If you can, please give them a virtual applause or thumbs up. I just remind everyone too that we will make the slides from today available, both in a follow-up email that will probably send out, what do you think Lisa, tomorrow? Probably tomorrow, they'll also get posted to the Grand Challenges website, so you'll be able to access them in a couple different ways. Any questions today that we're not addressed will add to our FAQs page that we hope to publish before our next session, which runs from one to 2 p.m. on Friday, June 12th. If you're not registered for that already, oh, sorry, one to 3 p.m., sorry, I misspoke on the time. So our next session is Friday, June 12th from one to 3 p.m. Lisa can drop that link or has already dropped that link into the chat box. If you wanna register for additional sessions, please go to our Grand Challenges website. Let us know, we'll get you registered. Thank you for your time today, and we hope to see you on Friday. If you have any questions, comments, and concerns, please reach out. Thanks again to everyone. Take care, be safe, bye-bye.