 Good morning, everyone. I see everyone's cameras are popping on, and audios are connecting. Good morning. Thank you for joining us today. In just a few minutes, we're going to turn it over to the organizers. Well, Nathan, so that he can tell you the goal of what we're doing today and this next part of our series. If this is your first time with us, welcome. I'm Donalyn. I'm from a company called No Innovation, and we'll be helping push buttons behind the scenes and get everyone where they need to go today. I'm here with my colleague Ann Marie. If you need any technical support at any point in time today or have general questions or just feel lost in any way, shape, or form, please do send a chat to either one of us, just in case I'm sure we're all professionals at this right now, but just in case that chat button looks like a word bubble at the bottom of the screen. So feel free to chat either one of us. We will be spending time today in KaiStorm. My colleague Ann Marie is going to drop a link to KaiStorm in that chat box right now. So just in case you haven't logged in yet, it will be ideal if you can get in. Not only will it hold our agenda, but it also will hold all of our breakout documents that we'll be working in today, as well as Zoom rooms so that everyone can kind of have private conversations in these writing groups. So we're going to drop that link in the chat box. It's there. Thank you, Ann Marie. If you have any problems logging in, you can log in either via Google or if you haven't done it before, log in via Google or you can log in with a username and email or email and password of your choice. Just don't forget it because you'll want it for the next two sessions as well. If you have any problems, let us know. Ann Marie will definitely drop that link for you again. Thank you. And with that, I think I'm going to turn it over to Nathan. Nathan, we're going to come back on a little bit later and follow up your comments. Thanks, Donalyn. So good morning, everyone. It's great to be online with so many of you today. I recognize lots of familiar faces and names, but also see several new ones, which is very exciting to me. So for those of you whom I've not yet met, my name is Nathan Meyer and I have the privilege to serve as Assistant Vice Chancellor for Research in the Office of Research and Economic Development. And Chancellor Ronnie Green has asked ORED to sort of take on responsibility for identifying a portfolio of grand challenge themes. And that's what we've been at work on over the last few months and that's why we're here today. So as we pick up and return to that grand challenge work that we started in early summer, sort of continued over the summer into August, I just want to touch briefly on what we're up to, both where we have been and what we hope to accomplish the next few weeks. And just want to start out by saying that we really appreciate your help, your participation and your engagement in the process. So you should all recall that pursuit of grand challenges was called for as part of the audacious vision charted for UNL by both the N-150 Commission and the N-2025 Strategy Team. We've got one of the Strategy Team members, leaders here, Rick Bevin, so you're going to hear from in a few minutes. Importantly and probably practically for many of you, the second and third aims of our N-2025 Strategic Plan requires us as an institution to prioritize our research by aligning at least 50% of our strategic investments in grand challenges. And so you may recall that Chancellor Green suggested three grand challenges for campus during his 2020 State of the University address back in February. I know it seems literally like eons ago. Then throughout the summer, we worked with Donna Lynn and Marie and their team to get in a collaborative online process in which more than 400 UNL faculty, students, staff and friends helped us move forward by participating in an online collaborative process that identified four additional grand challenge areas in which UNL is well positioned to contribute. More recently, the Chancellor and members of his executive leadership team decided to add one more theme. So with Ronnie's comments back in February, with our work over the summer, we ended up with a portfolio of seven grand challenge themes. But more recently, the leaders on campus decided to add one additional theme, bringing us to eight in total. And this most recent addition is explicitly focused on furthering our institutional journey toward anti-racism at Nebraska. And so to summarize, we have that portfolio of eight grand challenge themes. And they are in alphabetical order, anti-racism and racial equality, climate resilience, early childhood education and development, health equity, quantum science and engineering, science, engineering and technology for society and sustainable food and water security. And so that's where we've been. We've identified a list of eight grand challenge themes. And today with help from No Innovation, we're gonna introduce the process by which we're asking you members of the UNL community to help develop brief written descriptions for each of those themes. And we're really asking you, hoping that you're willing to engage, volunteer, contribute your ideas over the next few weeks to help flesh out brief written descriptions for each of those themes. Then once we have a description for each theme, we're gonna combine them into a master grand challenge portfolio that really is going to serve as the North Star for the work we do here at UNL through release 2025. And I suspect beyond that. Once we have this combined portfolio, a draft of that document will be released for review and public wider comment just after the first of the year. And then following about a two week feedback period, we're gonna make some final revisions to the document and then publish that portfolio along with the start of spring semester, the week of January 25th. So that's the plan the next few weeks. Just some sort of practical advice and comments that I was thinking about this morning to sort of help situate your thinking for the work that we're gonna do today in the next couple of weeks, some things to bear in mind. I just hope everyone understands that these grand challenge themes and the short descriptions that we're asking you to help us write really represent opportunity spaces. The purpose of these theme descriptions is to carve out rhetorical space for the big ideas and the exciting work that you all, the individuals, teams, and programs on our campus are gonna pursue at Nebraska in the next few years. So not to, as the chancellor would say not to draw too dark of a line underneath this, but I really wanna be clear, at this time we're not asking you to outline plans for specific projects. And so to maybe help orient your thinking, I wanted to share that I really approached these themes as eight big broad umbrellas under which I hope most all of the work at UNL, the work done by our faculty, our students and our staff will fall under in the years ahead. So in some cases that work is gonna reside squarely underneath one umbrella, but I suspect in many, if not most instances, your work is going to cut across more than one theme. So if you or your colleagues are having difficulty seeing the alignment of your work with one or more of the themes, please let me know and I'd like to have an offline sidebar conversation with you about some ideas and suggestions that I have for making that alignment more clear and more explicit. And really I just wanna emphasize comments that the chancellor Green has made both by email and publicly over the last couple of weeks, we really need the experience and the insights brought by all disciplines to contribute to the solutions that are going to be developed in response to our grand challenge themes. We really want everybody at UNL and that's everybody on our campus to see themselves in their work somewhere in this grand challenge space. So hopefully that sets the context for where we've been, what we're gonna do today. With that I'd like to invite my colleague, Rick Bevins to add some color and context about grand challenges from the perspective of the N-2025 strategy team. As many of you know, Rick wears many professional hats. He's a faculty member in the department of psychology. He's a center director. He's an interim associate vice chancellor for research and he's a rat runner. But I asked Rick to share some thoughts today about the grand challenges given his role in leadership as a co-chair of the N-2025 strategy team and our strategic plan. So with that, Rick, I'm willing to turn it over to you for a bit and welcome your comments. Thank you, Nathan. That was a wonderful setup. And I wanna just echo a couple of things that Nathan said first. And one is just sort of, it's great to see everybody. And so thrilled that so many people are engaged and thank you in advance for engaging in this process. It's gonna change the landscape of the university and refocus its research and creative activities. And so this really, really has to come from you all, right? The faculty, the staff, the students, all have to be the ones that drive this. So we hopefully can provide you the space. And as you heard, Nathan say the resources to make it realized, but you are the drivers. I'd also would echo Nathan to feel free to reach out to me if you're not seeing how you align with grand challenges and we can talk through aspects of those. I have been parts of many different interdisciplinary teams and it's been surprising like, what, journalism's part of the, or what? And we're talking about brain mechanisms of drug abuse and sensation seekers, but yet we have big projects related to journalism and advertising. So the connections are amazing that can be made once we really start thinking out of the box. So with that, to the end of 2025, I thought I'd talk just a little bit about process just to remind us how we actually got here and got to the grand challenges being a part of the strategic plan for the end 2025. And so as Nathan has said, it started with a very bold vision laid out in the N150. And the chancellor rightly so said, well, now we need a strategic plan to start realizing that vision. And so what the chancellor did then was identify four co-chairs of which I was one and a committee made up of 26 leaders, staff, people, you know, all around campus and in the community as a strategy team to start developing. This would, we discussed the N150, the visions. This was unfolded over a well over a semester, gathering all kinds of information, figuring out what was part of the N150. Then the co-chairs took all of this information and distilled it down into a draft of aims and strategies, expectations. And what was probably the most exciting part for me, and actually part that made me excited about then taking this job as associate vice chancellor for research was vetting it out in the bigger community and the bigger university. So this plan went out everywhere. I mean, we went to every college and presented it. We went to alumni. We went to students. We went to organizations. So we went out everywhere and took all of that feedback. And what you'll see is as a product of all of that feedback, we ended up with six aims. Now the aims are interwoven, they're interacting and they're synergistic, but if you kind of strip them out a little bit, you'll see that two are based on research and creative activities really focused squarely on that. The first is establish a culture at Nebraska committed to increasing the impact of research and creative activities. The second aim is focus, research, scholarship, creative activity and student experience to foster innovation, interdisciplinary endeavors and solve challenges critical to Nebraska in the world. Now, I encourage you to go back and it's online, but I got the hard copy here to read each of these and read the different strategies, the different targets, the different expectations. But what I wanna do is sort of focus in a little bit on the ones that are associated with the Grand Challenges. I will say it wasn't inevitable that Grand Challenges were going to be a part of the first five year strategic plan. And there was a lot of discussion around it. Do we actually just have them identified by the end of the first five years, so by 2025, but with the Chancellor's and the Associate, or the Vice Chancellor for Research's goals in terms of research and creative activity, it was decided that we need to launch and we need to be in and getting these Grand Challenges well on their way in the first five years. So thanks to Nathan and all the team for getting this rolling so fast, because this is not an easy task to do. So with that, I'm gonna go into that second aim that talks about focus, research and scholarship, because that's where the Grand Challenges sit. And the aims are made up of strategies, expectations and targets. Now, the co-chairs and all of you all who participated in the process of developing the strategic plan wrote those aspects. And then the, I just want to be clear that the targets were then written by the Chancellor and his leadership team in terms of some targets. What's being measured? How are they gonna know success? So if you go in and read the strategies that are related, I'm just gonna read them quick to you in that one aim in the strategies, seven, eight and nine all have to do with the Grand Challenges. And so I'm hoping what this does is provide you sort of the importance wrapped around these and the context for them as you're doing your work to write these umbrellas, as Nathan said. So identify Grand Challenges that leverage existing strengths and seek to solve issues important to Nebraska and the world. Commit, generate and expand sources of support for investment in Grand Challenges, interdisciplinary research, creative activity and education. Integrate creative activities and education into solutions for Grand Challenges in an intentional and substantive manner. I'll come back to that one in a minute. If you then go down to the expectations, increase number of national international collaborations in Grand Challenge areas, Grand Challenge topics for Nebraska established and resources committed to them, structures and systems established to support research and creative activities aligned with Grand Challenges. And then lastly is the target and Nathan had already mentioned this, 50% of strategic research investment aligned with university prioritized Grand Challenges. So to kind of just wrap up, I just wanna focus on a few things to consider. So again, as I've said, it's clearly as they're written here intended by the committee, the co-chairs, the chancellor, it is meant to be driven by you. It's clear that they're going to be investments made to make sure that we realize the importance of these Grand Challenges and move towards finding solutions that are posed by the Grand Challenges. They're clearly going to be interdisciplinary. They're clearly going to involve Nebraska, the country and the globe. And lastly, it should be very clear from how they're written that we're not going to have the impact we think we're going to have in these Grand Challenges if the work and effort of our colleagues and the humanities and the arts is a not part of our thinking and not part of our work. And so I really want to encourage those in the humanities and the arts, I wanna encourage those in the sciences and social sciences to really be thinking together how we can build with each other. So with that, thank you. Thanks, Rick, I appreciate that. You had visibility on sort of the evolution of this over the last couple of years. So I appreciate you sharing those insights.