 The U.S. Army Research Laboratory recently selected its regional lead for ARL Central in Chicago, Illinois. The lab announced its new regional partnership at ARL's Open Campus Open House held last fall. ARL selected Dr. Mark Schaup as ARL Central's regional lead in December. I think I'm very excited about being selected as the regional lead for ARL Central, you know, in particular because it can have such a big impact for the Army Research Lab and for the Army. Schaup said ARL Central is an extension of the lab's Open Campus framework. We started with let's bring the partners into us to work at our labs to work alongside with our reach searchers and our capability, you know, and now we're actually going out to these institutions. So we're going out to our partners. We're going to bring staff scientists, you know, locate them 100 percent of the time right by them. And I think that that's where we're going to get open exchange of ideas. We're going to get rapidly pursuing these technologies, you know, and hopefully bring more innovation to science and technology for the warfighter. The laboratory's central hub is located at the University of Chicago's Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and includes additional regional academic institutions to include Northwestern University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Illinois at Chicago, Purdue University, University of Wisconsin, area laboratories such as Argonne National Laboratory and other Army installations such as Rock Island Arsenal and local industry. A ribbon-cutting event for ARL Central was well attended and held in conjunction with Veterans Day November 10th. It was great to see all of our partners there and represented. It was also great to see Army leadership all the way up to the acting secretary of the Army as well as on the political side. I mean, you see the Senator Durbin was there, Mayor Emanuel. You know, I'm really excited, as is everybody here, about where we're going with ARL Central and how we're going to go forward with all of these partners. ARL Central is the third laboratory extension that has been opened for the Army. We're really starting to fill in the ecosystem across the country now for all of our extensions. ARL Central is mostly about the work we're going to do in the Internet of Battlefield Things. It's about the work we're going to do in material science at the dynamic compression sector at Argonne Laboratories and perhaps it's about some work we're going to do in quantum information sciences. But it really completes the picture and allows us to extend our reach into the central part of the country. So coupled with ARL West, ARL South, and the soon-to-be-established ARL Northeast, we'll have ARL locations nationally. From Aberdeen Proving Ground, Joyce Conant, ARL-TV.