 We're very fortunate today to have with us Lloyd LePage, who is the CEO of the new CDIR consortium. As most of you know through my various presentations over the past few years, the CDIR have been going through a major reform process, a change process. So what I'd like to do is invite Lloyd up to the podium here. He can share some of his thoughts, observations, and then take some questions before we move on to the second speaker. So Lloyd? I'd like to thank Dr. Siegler in particular for the invitation to come here and to participate in the monitoring and evaluation workshop. We're really excited to be part of this new initiative. And Erie really has led the way and set the standard. And many of you have been involved with, and I'm sure are exhausted, with all the work that has gone into developing GRISP and many of the initiatives. And we're really excited that it was one of the very first, I would say the first, CRP CDIR research program that was approved and launched. And we're working very hard to make sure that the funding is flowing as rapidly as possible. I'd also like to thank Dr. Doberman also for his invitation to participate in the workshop. And again, Erie has been leading the way and we hope to learn a lot from the workshop this week that we can apply to other CRPs and to be able to share how that might best be an example for the future. Erie has really become an example not only for the Philippines but also for the sub-region. And as we extend out into partnerships now through GRISP also with the close relationship where you have with the African Rice Center and with CIAP, we're really excited to be part of that and that you are leading the way in that partnership. And we encourage you to continue. Yesterday and in this previous week I also had the opportunity to visit some of the exciting developments that we've seen in the drop screening that you're doing in the field. It's great to see that, some of the salt tolerant work and also the flood tolerant work. And again, Erie is leading the way in terms of looking at new innovation and how that might not only be brought into the CGIR, but then also delivered to farmers and into farmers fields and maximizing that global access. How are we doing in terms of getting the 15 centers to work together? It's a learning process. I think a lot of the history of the past is that centers have worked together in the past. And we need to encourage and identify those areas of success that have been out there. There is a matter of building trust. We need to be able to build trust not only between the centers amongst themselves, but also between the centers and the consortium, the consortium office, that we're on your side. We might make mistakes, but help us to understand those mistakes and help us to understand where we can improve. So, you know, I think the CRP process, the proposal process, has already gone a long way in helping centers to work together. It's achieved, it's nothing else, it's already achieved a lot of successes. Just by that factor alone, there's scientists that are talking today that we're never talking in the past between centers, or we're talking on a very limited basis. We're seeing that much more in depth now than we were before. We're encouraging that at not only the board levels, but the DG levels with myself, and also the scientists' levels, the finance folks, the other communications we talked about before. Again, at all levels, we need to strengthen and build those bridges between centers. So I would say that we're making progress, but it's going to take quite some time until we really have a very powerful, strong connection between the centers.