 It's exciting to see that we still have so many people here in attendance. Let me start by just asking us to muse on the symbiotic relationship that is experienced in this community between the research community and the sponsors that we have here. As you know, sponsors usually help to fray some of the costs of the meeting, and then what we do is we go and buy their products. And what we'd like to do is just make sure that they get a little bit of exposure. The sponsors that we have are Kiogen, Roche, Illumina, Mobile, Lifetech, Metabolone, and the journal Microbiome. Many of the sponsors are here, and I really strongly encourage people to stop by and look at their products. That would be very helpful, thank you. One other logistical item, we are holding a poster award, and the ballots are starting to come in. We have a ballot box right outside where I'm pointing, and if you use the green card that's associated with your name tag as a ballot, that would be very helpful. So please vote on your favorite poster. The last thing I'd like to mention is that this meeting is very much about hearing from all of you about your gaps, needs, and challenges. And we've been receiving lots of different approaches from people when they talk about this. Lita and I very much had in mind getting things like practical gaps that are preventing you or encumbering you or challenging you to be able to do your work. So as an example, just show of hands here how many people have submitted data to SRA and how many people have had difficulty submitting data to SRA. That's an example of the type of thing that we're talking about. It would be helpful for that to emerge. The purpose of that is to let program officers know that it's difficult. There may be ways that we could develop policies to streamline things that result in challenges for you, and getting that down on record would be very helpful. And Rob and Jacques are writing a report, and we'd like at some stage for them to try to summarize some of the gaps and challenges that we've encountered and share them with you. And we do hope that this really does appear on record at some point. So that would be very helpful. So as the talks are given, any time that those types of things could emerge and be articulated, that would be helpful. And those of you who still have time to change any of your slides in your presentations, feel free to toss things in there. I think issues having to do with harmonization of protocols, places where policy development could make your life easier, ways that we could make the policies across all the NIH institutes more uniform to simplify things, all of those things are open. And of course, we are not aware of all of them, so please share them with us. All right. So I'll ask Rob Knight, the session shareer, to come up to introduce our first keynote speaker. Okay. Thanks, Alan. And again, on that report, we really would appreciate anything that you would like to give into that report. Email me or Jacques and we'll make sure it gets in there. We also welcome additional co-authors for it and so forth. It would be really nice if it can be a consensus piece for the community, really highlighting those current gaps, needs and challenges. So anyway, so it's my great pleasure to introduce Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello, who's currently at NYU. So Maria Gloria has covered a really amazing scope in her research. So she got her bachelor's in Samanwalaba University in Caracas, Venezuela in the field of biology. Then got a master's at Aberdeen, an animal nutrition, and then a PhD also at Aberdeen in microbiology, so even then spanning a fairly wide range of research topics. And after that, did a series of postdoctoral appointments in France, the US, Scotland, Sweden, Spain, Venezuela. I had to write them all down because it's hard to keep track of her bouncing around the globe and working on a lot of different exciting research topics there. My first paper was actually on sharks, although since then she's studied a number of other topics including the watson, which is a follower of Spurred, so adapted to eating leaves with a surprising amount of convergent evolution to mammalian herbivores. She's also done a fair bit of work on other mammalian species on helicobacter pylori and then more recently, switching more to the human microbiome, including studies, doing a very important study looking at how the delivery mode of infants affects their microbiome and also the development of infants. So one really fascinating aspect of the microbiome, as she will tell us shortly, is this question about how much we've altered the microbiome through modern practices, including antibiotics. So you've heard from a number of speakers yesterday about that topic and so one fascinating thing that Maria Gloria has been able to do is to go into the Amazon and work with people living very traditional lifestyles and I think she's going to tell us a lot about the results of that research today, including its impact on the microbiota. So I think I'll leave it at that and I'm really looking forward to what I'm sure will be a spectacular talk. So if you could join me in welcoming Maria Gloria.