 Good morning, and I wish you a warm welcome to the 33rd annual McLean Fellows Conference here at the University of Chicago. This conference remembers Dorothy Jean McLean, who helped create the McLean Center and was deeply committed to its work. This annual Fellows Conference is one of the McLean Center's signature events. Dorothy McLean believed that education was the best way to improve the world. And throughout her life, she supported many leading educational institutions, including Colorado College, Dartmouth, Yale, and the University of Chicago. I wish to acknowledge also, and thank Dorothy's son, Barry McLean, who is with us today virtually. And to also remember Barry's late wife, Marianne McLean. Together, Barry and Marianne served for 25 years as co-chairs of the McLean Center Advisory Board. We all owe a great debt to Barry and the McLean family for their continuing support of the Center and of this annual conference. I also want to give my deepest thanks to Rachel Kohler, the McLean Center's current chair of the board for Rachel's outstanding leadership and support in guiding the Center's vision for the future. Over the next two days, the conference will feature more than 40 lectures divided into seven panels focusing on central topics in clinical medical ethics. All of the conference speakers are either current or former McLean Center fellows or current or former McLean Center faculty. After each of the seven panels, we will have a panel discussion among the speakers with questions and answers from our virtual audience. I would also like to ask the audience with us to please write your questions using the Q&A feature and please list your name and home institution. Clinical medical ethics, which we started here at the University of Chicago in 1972, is a central component of clinical care that must be practiced and applied by licensed clinicians in their routine daily encounters with patients. The goals of clinical medical ethics are to improve patient care and outcomes by helping physicians, nurses, and other health professionals identify and respond to clinical ethical challenges that arise in the everyday care, both of inpatients and outpatients. Clinical medical ethics addresses many clinical ethical issues, including truth telling, informed consent, confidentiality, surrogate decision making, end of life care, and also encourages personal, humane, compassionate, and respectful interactions between clinicians and patients. Over time, the practice of clinical medical ethics has gradually become the professional and legal standard of care in the United States. The McLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics Fellowship program is the oldest, largest, and in my view, the most successful clinical ethics fellowship training program in the world. Since beginning the fellowship program in 1984, coming on out to 38 years ago, the center has trained more than 600 fellows, including almost 500 physicians. Many graduates of the fellowship program include more than 95 surgeons, and they've become leaders and mentors who advance scholarship in clinical medical ethics and who are committed to improving the technical, compassionate, and ethical care of patients nationally and worldwide. Graduates of the McLean Fellowship have served as directors of more than 45 medical ethics programs in the United States, Canada, South America, Europe, Africa, Australia, South Korea, and China. McLean Center fellowship graduates have held faculty appointments at more than 70 university medical programs in the US and Canada. More than 30 fellowship graduates have held university endowed professorships. Former fellows of the McLean Center have written more than 200 books and thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. This year, for the second consecutive year, the McLean Center is training fellows using Zoom. And the number of fellows that we have is the largest we've ever had. 71 fellows who have clinical backgrounds in medicine, surgery, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, psychiatry, in nursing, as well as in law and humanities. The current McLean fellows are affiliated with the University of Chicago, with Lurie Children's Hospital, Rush Medical College, UIC, and Loyola University, as well as distant universities that include Duke, University of California in San Francisco, Brigham and Women's University in Boston, the universities of Michigan, Maryland, Ohio State, Iowa, Minnesota, Penn State, Missouri, and many other programs around the world, including in China, South Korea, India, Pakistan, Qatar, Ukraine, Nigeria, Zambia, Tanzania, Italy, and more. I would also like to call your attention to the McLean Center Prize in Clinical Ethics. This year's prize will be awarded tomorrow morning on Saturday at 10 a.m. Central Standard Time by Dr. Kenneth Polanski, the Dean of the University of Chicago Biological Sciences Division and of the Pritzker School of Medicine. The McLean Center Prize is a $50,000 reward that recognizes outstanding work in the field of clinical medical ethics. The winner of this year's McLean Center Prize is Dr. Bernard Lowe from San Francisco. Dr. Lowe will be giving a talk entitled Clinical Medical Ethics, How Did We Start? Where Are We Headed? That talk will be tomorrow on Saturday at 10.15 a.m. Central Standard Time. Let me add that Dr. Lowe is a distinguished clinician, ethicist, and researcher. For many years, Dr. Lowe is the president and currently is the president emeritus of the Greenwall Foundation. I now wish also to recognize our Outstanding Advisory Board that has included Rachel Kohler as chair, Kay Bucksbaum, Craig Dusheswa, Stan and Ann Dudley-Goldblatt, Nancy Foster, Dean Guestel, Connie and Dennis Keller, Duncan McLean, Bob Merly, Carol Siegel, and Brian Traubert. And of course, Barry McLean. Finally, I want to acknowledge and thank the McLean Center associate directors, Peter Angelos, Lainey Ross, Monica Peek, and Marshall Chin, as well as the McLean Center faculty and the McLean Fellows for all their great work and for their participation in this year's McLean Center conference. Let me now introduce our first moderator today, Dr. Monica Peek. Dr. Peek will moderate a panel entitled Health Policy and Health Disparities. That panel will meet from now until 10.40 AM Chicago time. We then will turn after a brief break to panel number two that will be directed and moderated by Dr. John Lanterns. Let me tell you about Monica Peek's panel. Monica Peek, MD, MPH, specializes in general internal medicine and in preventive health for adults. Monica has a particular interest in reducing health care disparities and concentrates these efforts on diabetes care and breast cancer screening education for African-American patients. As principal investigator on two multi-year clinical studies, Dr. Peek aims to improve diabetes care and medical outcomes for patients here on the south side of Chicago. Also in her role as one of the two inaugural faculty fellows in the Bucksbaum Institute for Clinical Excellence here at the university, Monica explores how racial and cultural barriers can have an impact on physician-patient relations and on shared decision-making. Monica Peek has been an invited speaker to many local and national medical meetings. She serves on the boards of several advocacy organizations and is regularly involved in community-based education activities. In addition, Dr. Peek is the author of more than 60 peer-reviewed publications and abstracts exploring health care disparities in minority populations. Let me turn the program over now to the distinguished moderator, Dr. Monica Peek. Thank you.