 OK. By way of introduction, this is Ellen Rolfes, who is known as the executive officer of the Institute, sort of the moral equivalent of the chief administrative officer. Ellen at council meetings tends to just live in the shadows, because we mostly talk about scientific program. When it comes to day-to-day running of NHGRI, it is just the opposite. She is far from in the shadows. She is an outstanding administrative and management leader of the entire Institute, far more popular at the Institute than I am, and does an amazingly good job in her over 20 years at the Institute. And coming up the ranks to now for a number of years has been the lead administrative leader of the Institute. And we're going to talk about something that has a heavy administrative aspect and sort of a formal process, governmental process, that falls in Ellen's domain. So she's going to introduce it. I'm going to give the background what we're going to do, and then she's going to moderate any discussion if there is any. And by the way, she was very excited to get up here near the gavel, because she thinks it's some power thing, which it really isn't. But if she reaches for it, I may slap her. But go ahead. OK. Yeah. He wasn't supposed to say that. So I'm just going to give you a brief overview of the any time we're going to make an organizational change what that process is. It's indeed a formal process in the NIH specifically, but across the federal government as well. So an organizational change includes creating an entity, changing its name, moving it from one place to another, or getting rid of it all together. So in case of the NIH, all organizational changes that Eric may want to make for the Institute have to be approved at the NIH level. And in some cases, it has to go to the Department of Health and Human Services. And in subset of those cases, it even requires a 14-day congressional notification. So in the case of the proposal that Eric's going to share with you today, we have already gotten, we've already cleared the HHS process, and we also received no congressional responses. Because this organizational change has organizational entities that interact directly with the public, it requires us to also provide public notice and to hold two public hearings. So today's meeting, we're going to use the council meeting to cover the first public hearing. And we'll hold the second public hearing on February 19 at 1 o'clock using social media, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And during that period of time, Eric will present what he's about to present to you here and allow the social media world to interact with him and ask questions. And it'll be a real-time interaction. We've established a website that includes the public notices, and it'll include this presentation. And after the two public meetings, and assuming he doesn't hear anything that changes his mind, we'll then proceed with the formal process of getting all the paperwork together. And that includes showing the as-is and the proposed changes and putting a few memos together that talk about the budgetary and the personal impact of the proposed organizational changes. In this particular case, there are no personnel or budgetary implications, but we have to go through that process anyway. So let's see. Eric will now provide the details of this proposed organizational change. And then following that, we'll take questions, and I'll help moderate that on his behalf. Thank you, Alan. So again, we're using the convenience of the open session of council being a public meeting put in the federal register and live broadcast. So it's, again, the convenience of doing this and accomplishing one of the two public hearings must be, must have to make this organizational change. Now, as a reminder, this is the current organizational structure of the Institute. This was the organization that I created, which was a substantial change to what the Institute, how the institute was organized when I first became director. And in fact, it was about eight years ago, a little over eight years ago, that we were able to accomplish this reorganization. And at the same, when we went to do it, in fact, we used an open session of council as one of the public hearings, one of the two public hearings, when we made this reorganization to create this seven-division structure. So by way of review, you can just sort of look from left to right, these seven divisions. The far left division, division of management, that's actually Ellen's division. So she's the division director for the division of management. The next division over division of policy communications and education, that's the one we're going to talk about here that's going to involve reorganization. Then we have the division of intramural research, our intramural research program, which you're actually going to hear about the next council meeting in greater detail, because we're going to have our scientific director come and give an update about what's going on there. And then what you guys live and breathe are the four divisions of the extramural research program. And you can read the names there. And in particular, you spend the most time dealing with the three programmatic divisions, the one in genome sciences, genomic medicine, and genomics and society. And the division of extramural operations with Betty Graham runs, handles grants administration and review and a lot of the aspects of just running the extramural research program. So this is the structure. And it's served, I think, the Institute extremely well over the last eight years. And it has served me very well as the director. I'm very comfortable with the structure. But changes happen. And that leads to opportunities for new structures. And what happened about 10 months ago is the founding director of the Division of Policy, Communications and Education, Laura Rodriguez, very familiar to many of you, departed the Institute, leaving a vacancy at the leadership level. And also, though, an opportunity to maybe think about that division. I had created, Laura and I had created that division from parts. It wasn't like it was a longstanding structure within the Institute. We had taken different parts and it, over time, had evolved into a structure that we thought should be a division. That's what we did. By way of reminder, it's pretty straightforward. The Division of Policy, Communications and Education has three major components. There are branches, one about policy, longer name, one around communication, one about education, each with longer names. But you get the idea. When Laura departed, very deliberately, rather than just finding a single person to oversee it on an interim basis until we made decisions about long-term organization and leadership, we actually, talking with my other leaders of the Institute, we decided it was time to sort of maybe think a little bit about the components and how they interact with different parts of the Institute. And so on an interim basis, actually, we split up those three branches and sent them to three different people to have interim oversight. In fact, I took the communications group directly to oversee on an interim basis. And I had the policy group of Vence Bonham, my senior advisor stepped in to oversee, and Larry Brody stepped in and helped oversee the education group, again, on an interim basis. But part of that was also a chance to really look more carefully at those branches, think about the synergies, think of the opportunities, think about how they're organized and how they interact with different parts of the Institute. And so then considering long-term what I wanted to do, I thought about several options. One was just recruit a division director and we put it back together the way it was. But I also considered some other ways to maybe gain new synergies and new opportunities. And I consulted with a number of people, both inside the Institute, I also consulted with some people outside the Institute, and it just sort of looked fresh at what we had and what we might be able to do. And so I decided to move forward with several proposed changes related to those three branches. And so I will tell you what this is gonna look like. I would like to move forward and reduce the total number of divisions to six, basically eliminating the divisional policy communication education. It will no longer exist as a division, but all of its components will continue to exist. They'll just be placed in different parts of the organization. For starters, I have grown fond of having the communications group reporting directly to me. I think there's some really important and valuable alignments and direct interactions with me. We joked about my new Twitter, but that's just an example. I'm very involved in a lot of things going on with the communications group and having it reporting to me and interacting with me has worked well on an inner basis. And I would like to continue that on a longer term basis. So it would be structurally out of the office of the director. But then meanwhile, the other two components I would like to have become part of the division of genomic society. So the policy group and the education group would now be part of the division of genomics and society. And then meanwhile, of course, the division of genomic society already has the LC research program. They were largely synonymous, so they're gonna now be part of a branch. So we'll put LC research program. But look very carefully how I'm drawing this because it's very deliberate. Notice that the LC research program and its branch will live within side the extramural research program within the extramural research program programmatic components. And the policy group and the education group will live outside the extramural research program. In essence, the division of genomics and society will be a hybrid division, or sometimes referred to as a zebra division because it's gonna have both extramural responsibilities and non-extramural responsibilities. This is not unprecedented at NIH. Some other institutes have such things. And one can imagine lots of advantages of that. So to be clear, these two new branches will not be part of the extramural program. They'll just be cohabitating with a component of the extramural program within the division of genomics and society. What are some of the benefits of this? Well, I already mentioned the benefit, at least from the communications point of view and reporting directly to me. So I see that as a very beneficial aspect for me and the institute to have communications emanating off of the director. In terms of aligning the policy group and the education group with the division of genomic society, I actually think it makes incredible sense. I think there's some really wonderful opportunities for synergy with what the policy group does and what the education group does and what some of the LC research program is thinking about and planning and some of the staff and what they're doing. And so I think in the past, having them not within the same organizational unit I think has actually inhibited interactions in some way. And I think putting them within under Larry Brody's in this case as leadership, as division director and having them organizationally more closely aligned will help break down some silos and probably result in better integration and I think better opportunities for having ways of building on the knowledge and the expertise that each of those branches have and they can then bring to each other. I would also point out that by doing this we will now have the division of genomic society which to be honest with that very small division in terms of personnel and story because it just has the LC research right now it has a much more right sided and more equitable sided size overall which I think in the long term will be beneficial to that division as you think about going forward with what that division could become in the coming years. So that's the basic plan. Let me reassure you about a couple of things Ellen already mentioned it but I really want to emphasize them. There's essentially no effect on budget no effect on the LC research budget no effect on the budget of any of these branches there's no effect on staffing this really is moving boxes along in the organizational chart there's no major staffing changes. I believe it's only going to enhance the LC research program through close relations with what I regard as intellectually sibling branches and it will also have no effect on council working groups though there's actually two council working groups highly relevant one we just heard from Jeff Botkin about genomic society there's also one on community engagement and that will continue also as a council working group very relevant again to activities in those branches. And so that is the plan. If you are interested there actually is a website that sort of is documenting this public hearing we'll also document the next one February 19th that you heard about so I just want to make you aware of that as well. So I will stop there happily take any questions looking for any input you may have in route to the next public hearing and then the final submission we will have to put forward to get final approval. And maybe it would be helpful I'll go back one just so you can continue to look at the new organization. Yeah, how? Oh, you should call. So could you talk about how broadly defined the educational mission of NHGRI is overall and what if all of it just some of it is included in now under the confines of this division how those are separated? So if Larry's around somewhere I don't know if Carla's here or not but people I will start but I encourage people. So how to the educational mission in general of the Institute I would say is very largely overseen by the education community involvement branch there it's probably where most of it is there's obviously that's in close synergy with the communications group because communication group certainly is the vehicle by which many things are communicated outward but I would say the real intellectual hub and programmatic priorities are set by Carla Easter who's our brand and her branch. By the way, the one thing I forgot to say it was in here somewhere but I forgot to say the reason we have to do a public hearing is because the education branch interacts with the public and because the communications branch interacts with the public those are sort of the two branches that are public facing therefore that's why we're doing we have to do public hearings but I'm not sure that totally answered your question but So I mean postgraduate training programs is that included? So that's training so no so you're talking then specifically about training programs of course postgraduate training programs and our intramural program live in the intramural program and then anything that we might find extramurally through grants would obviously be within our extramural program so again we probably see a slight how it gets executed probably a distinction between training and education Carla do you wanna but although a lot of interactions with those groups I would just expand on that so for instance when we think about informal education most of that comes from the branch so for instance the exhibition or what we're doing with WETA a lot of that resonates from the work that we do within the branch and then also healthcare provider education through programming like the ISCC those activities also live within the education and community involvement branch and so I would say education is very broad for us it's not only K-12 but it's also the public education and so we have a lot of educational programming that also is guided by and supported by the community engagement working group which does a lot of helping with our development of programming that really does focus on public education of genetics and genomics so we have a pretty broad I guess umbrella a lot of things that come under us but again I would define them differently than just training programs although we do a lot of outreach to K-12 I would say that's education not necessarily training but somewhat pipeline in the idea of sort of moving them into more substantial training programming so yeah. Comments, questions? Okay, we will take that as helpful input and thank you for your attention. You want to gavel us closed? No, you don't want to gavel. Sure.