 So, good evening everyone. After this afternoon and the concept clearance, I think that this briefing about a workshop that we held is extremely important and valuable in just thinking about some of the issues that are going on. In November of last year, NHGRI held a conference, a workshop with about 50 experts from both the extramural community and from federal agencies to discuss the research and programmatic needs to address the lay publics, and again I'm focusing on the lay publics, genomic literacy, and the goal of the workshop was to assess the public's current state of genomic literacy and to explore research and programmatic opportunities. We identified four specific objectives of charge for the meeting. What do we know now and what do we need to learn about the public's current knowledge about genetics and genomics to make healthcare decisions and to be informed citizens and what recommendations should we give the scientific community regarding research opportunities for studying the genomic literacy of the public, and what kind of educational programs will advance the public's understanding of genomic medicine and improve the effectiveness of healthcare. And finally, how can government agencies engage diverse communities in meaningful ways to increase genomic and genetic literacy. And again, there are a number of federal agencies and a number of institutes that participated in this workshop. So I just want to highlight here. We structured the workshop to focus on three different domains, one, genomic health literacy, second, science literacy, and third, how genomic literacy is informed by what the media does and how both can help to improve and enhance literacy or potentially is creating some of the difficulties in communicating information and strong scientific knowledge. So I want to just share this with you because these word clouds were developed by my colleague Dr. Hurley that identified what was our original charge, and it highlights here what we saw as the original charge issues, but then what was the most important for the meeting report. And you'll see here that health issues really came out of the workshop as the number one priority area with regards to literacy. So we went in with a much more agnostic view. Is it focused on science education and science literacy or is it focused on health? But clearly our experts coming from different disciplinary backgrounds identified health literacy related to genomics as the most important. So I'm going to briefly run through some of the recommendations that came from the workshop. And here, this is just a briefing for you, and then there's next steps that we're recommending to move forward. And so there would be any concept clearance, any kind of activities would come back to council, but these are the recommendations that came from the workshop. First, the need to integrate patient genomic literacy studies into genomic medicine and LC research programs. So the ability to integrate it into current activities within the institute. Promote research on best education practices, create a repository of robust methodologies and assessment tools. One of the issues that was raised was there's no one place to go and find really high quality measures tools that I can use in my studies to better understand and assess the literacy of the public. To study the use of family health history as a clinical tool, both from the perspective of the provider and the patient and how that information is used and the importance with regards to understanding genetic risk. And encourage new research partnerships with state governments, community-based organizations and private companies. There were several state departments of public health that participated in the meeting and they identified some activities are going on at the state level where there are opportunities to do really important research to move forward our understanding of public's literacy. We looked at issues of formal and informal education and a number of recommendations came out of that. One was to develop reliable and validated measures to assess the understanding of genetics and genomics and identify misconceptions. Studies to use of informal education to educate the public. This key issue of how can we use different kinds of environments to help to educate the public and promote community-based participatory research in public genomic literacy. This was a major recommendation that came out of the community-based organizations that participated in the study and a number of the researchers that participated. In the area of genomic literacy in the media, there were three areas that were highlighted. One, study communication of key genomic health messages, so actually studying how information is communicated and study the use of new media and new technologies to disseminate genomic information to the public. That we are now in this time where we're really moving to the ability to use new technologies to help to educate and inform the public and the need to study those issues. And finally, this issue of studying the language of genomics, how people use different concepts. And I have this example here, epigenetics, how one person may interpret what that means may be very different from another person and how we understand and interpret various concepts that now the public sees in the lay literature on a daily basis. So some general recommendations that came out of the workshop were to support research to define a set of knowledge needs for the public, and also to conduct a national survey of public understanding of genetics and genomics. And this could be done in a freestanding survey, a national survey, or it could actually add a set of questions to a current national survey that's conducted. And to monitor this over a period of time. So you could see doing this every year with a group of the U.S. public to determine how there have been changes with regards to genetic and genomic understanding and literacy. There's currently work going on in the U.K. that's similar to this where they're doing a national survey in the U.K. and a need for a parallel kind of effort in the United States. And establishing an internet clearing house of tools, surveys, project summaries, again that was highlighted before, but this place, this resource where people can go to get high quality information. And there was a strong encouragement as a low hanging fruit was to bring a really a larger group of people together who are interested in issues of health literacy, science literacy, and genomic literacy at a meeting where they can both present their data from studies that they're currently doing as well as to help to encourage and facilitate new work. So next steps. This is the first step is to get your input with regards to this area and the importance of this area to the institute and where we may want to take this from the perspective of follow-up with regards to the workshop. Dissemination of the workshop findings to the scientific community. We are in the process of developing a meeting report to be published so that the broader scientific community will have access to this and hopefully encourage other agencies and individual researchers to do work in this area. And to refocus and develop new education community involvement activities related to this. Within the Office of Policy Communications and Education, the Education and Community Involvement Branch is involved in a number of different educational programs, but really starting to focus specifically on this specific area based on the recommendations that we received. And finally to integrate research opportunities into RFAs and to PAs within the institute. So thinking about a number of the different concept clearance activities this afternoon, how potentially we could integrate issues around genomic literacy for the public directly into other activities that we're doing to really to take advantage of them. So with that I want to acknowledge all the individuals who were involved in this process. We had an external planning committee and you see their names here as well as the NHGRI internal planning committee and our keynote speakers. But I want to highlight one person who happens to be in the audience and that's Dr. Bell and Hurley who actually did a lot of the hard and difficult work to make sure that this workshop was very successful. So with that I will take questions. Ten minutes or less? Questions? Yes. For a question and then a comment. Back when, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago, wasn't there money that set aside an LC for educational efforts 20 years ago and we got rid of it or something? So my colleagues in the LC program are in the audience and they can also speak up. But now I think it's been about seven years ago. A decision was made by the LC advisory group at that time to stop doing programmatic work, to continue to do education research. However, the number of grants that have been actually approved in that area have been very limited. But not to do programmatic, not to just create educational materials. Joy? Hear me? The in 2003, I guess it was, we got a recommendation or maybe it was 2005, a recommendation to discontinue our R25 program, which actually developed largely developed curriculums for genetic education. What we have done and continue to do is we do a lot of literacy or education efforts as part of a lot of our clinical integration projects where they're actually looking at how patients, doctors, families absorb information, what are the best approaches to explaining information to them and how they respond to that information. Yes. I think this is a great idea, however it plays out. I think there's an RFA in this area would be really fantastic. One thing I would recommend is there's been a lot of effort that, I mean, you're the idea of a clearinghouse I think is really important because there's been a lot of effort in individual projects to do work like this, like we did a consent form for sample donation years ago and in order to create that consent form we did really extensive research about what people understood and what they didn't understand in terms of describing genetics and sampling or donation of samples with various language and pictures and things and so I'm sure that there's a lot of work out there that has been done that would be really useful for people to be able to have as a basis. So just a thought as you put this together, that I think would be great. Thank you. By the way, I can't help but point out the fact that this whole discussion now, the confluence of education effort and the LC program, what they did previously. Again, it goes back to the question I was asked during the discussion of reorganization. This is coming out of what eventually I hope will be the division of policy, communications and education. This is what's emanating from and clearly there should be great interdigitation with what hope will be the division of genomic society around these issues and revisiting things and deciding what kinds of funding opportunities we might make available in that extramural division. So it makes sense to me. Anything else for events? All right. Thank you. You'll hear more.