 Hello everyone. I will use my gavel to call to order the 89th meeting of the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research. Welcome to everyone joining us remotely because this entire council meeting is being conducted in a virtual format. A particular welcome to our council members and hello to all the NHGRI staff because we are completely dispersed in different locations at the moment due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I did want to say just a couple comments about the circumstance we find ourselves in. First and foremost, I hope all of you watching and listening are safe and healthy. I certainly hope you remain that way. We are living in very challenging times and I hope people are doing their best to persevere through the many challenges the circumstance presents to us. Here at NHGRI, one of the challenges we obviously face is to continue to conduct the business we have in being an agency with responsibility to fund genomics research that must continue despite the current situation and among our many responsibilities include decisions about funding grants, both current opportunities, future opportunities and also getting general input from our advisory council. And I think as many of you know, we have three council meetings a year. They must go on because we have got to do the business of making sure we give the grants out in a timely fashion with the money we're given each fiscal year. And so we're very appreciative of our council members and of our staff to figure out a way to continue to do what we need to do in conducting a council meeting. When we normally gather, we gather in person and do this and obviously the present circumstances don't allow that. And so let me just start the council meeting by just saying an immense thank you to the NHGRI staff and that ranges everything from our IT staff to our communication staff to our program staff or ministry. I mean, immense number of people have been involved in trying to figure out how to conduct a council meeting remotely in virtual format and actually haven't organized all this virtually because we obviously have not been together for many, many weeks. And so fingers crossed this will all go well, but I'm sure it will go well. But most important is going well because of the incredible dedication and hard work by many people at the institute to make this happen. And again, a shout out to our council members for their flexibility of allowing us to do this kind of format, which all of us unfortunately have gotten used to. And so we're actually getting quite facile in conducting meetings virtually. This is the 89th meeting of this council. Again, meeting three times a year, you could do the arithmetic. I can't help but point out a little bit of a historic irony. I was thinking back on when was the last time we couldn't conduct a regularly scheduled council meeting in person. And it actually turns out it was an easy thing for me to remember because it was my very first council meeting as the new director. I became the director at December 1st of 2009. And I knew one of the big first things I had to do was to convene my first council meeting in February. So those, so I don't know what it was, an eight or 10 weeks were a blur, just getting ready for this first big council meeting. And that would have been, it was the 58th meeting of the National Advisor for Human Genome Research. And that weekend, something that affectionately got labeled snowmageddon hit the Washington DC area and immediately made it clear that an in-person meeting was not going to happen. And so my very first meeting as NHGRI director of this council, with this council, was also held virtually. And that old fashioned technology called conference calls. And now it's just so different. We did it all through a conference call. The difference, though, was that a small number of us from the senior staff were able to convene in a conference meeting, gather at least as opposed to the way we're all doing it now. Many cases completely isolated in a conference room or in a home study or somewhere all on our own. So it's a little different than what it was in snowmageddon, which was number 58. I also thought this morning, have there been any other major disruptions to an NHGRI council meeting? And there there is the number one historic story that comes in. It's turned out that council meeting number 33 was held on a Monday, that Monday was September 11 of 2001, which all of us, of course, know was 9 11. And in fact, that was an example where a council meeting actually got truncated, obviously, it had to end early because the events of that day. But there are some memorable stories of what has many memorable stories associated with 9 11. But that included the fact that all the council members were here in Bethesda. That meeting had to be immediately suspended. And then there were all sorts of issues associated with getting our council members back home again. That won't be a circumstance this time because they're already are home right now. But in any case, I just wanted to reflect on a little bit of history. Obviously, we are glad that these interruptions to our normal routines don't happen very often. 2001 2010 and now in 2020. But they do happen on occasion and we just figure out how we're going to proceed under the circumstances. So with that as a little bit of a historic backdrop, I will turn this over to our incredibly incompetent executive secretary, Ruby Bazzotti, let him proceed with the agenda. Thank you, Eric. Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome to the Council, the May Council meeting for NHGRI. I'll echo some of Eric's comments that this is our first time down this path. And so I'll ask for people's patience and understanding there may be some somewhat awkward pauses or moments of silence and equals. So a number of people, a number of times that people may try to speak over one another, but we'll get through it all. And we're happy to have this technology that allows us to complete our work. I want to remind the council that as Eric said, this is being live stream, but there's also there will also be a recording of the open session of this council meeting. And it will be archived along with all the other open sessions dating back to 2011, I believe, and available at the NHGRI website. We do have one new employee to introduce to the council members. Are we able to project her slide? There she is. Laura Eisenman. Laura has spent over 38 years as a federal employee. And for 19 of those years, she worked at the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Disease, where she served as a lead grants management specialist. Laura has also worked as a specialist at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. And for the past two years, and for as long as we can continue to talk her into doing it in the future, Laura joins us as a part time employee at the as a grants management specialist at the busiest time of the year in an effort to get all the awards out before the end of the fiscal year. So Laura, welcome back, welcome aboard. We're glad to have you again. Thank you. You can take the slide down please. I'd also like to acknowledge our Council Society liaison members who are viewing the council meeting on the web. Ellen Giarelli from the International Society of Nurses and Genetics. Mona Miller from the American Society of Human Genetics. Sharon Terry and Catherine Lambertson from the Genetic Alliance, and Rhonda Schoenberg from the National Society of Genetic Councils. Welcome and thank you all. Council members, I seek your approval of the minutes from the February Council meeting. Does anyone have any edits, correct corrections or changes that they would like to propose to those to the minutes? Okay, hearing none, I'll ask for a vote. Can I get a motion to approve the February minutes? Thank you. Any second, please? Second. And we're just going to do this by voice vote, all in favor. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Thank you very much. I want to draw your attention to the future meeting dates. They're listed on the open session agenda, the meeting dates for the next six Council meetings. Please have a look at them, share them with your schedule keepers. And if you notice any conflicts with any of those meetings, please let me know and notify Comfort Brown as well. And with that, I'm ready to turn the meeting back over to Eric for his director's report.