Thank you, Rudy. Let me reiterate something Rudy said is again that we are an open session. We are video casting this open session live and we're also videotaping it and making this part of our permanent resource of the Institute proceedings. That includes both videotapes but also many of the documents that are going to be discussed and presentations that are going to be shown during council. Now we do have some new folks here including some ad hoc members of council that are joining us for the first time. So if you're new to our council meetings I just want to make you aware of this electronic resource that's associated with my director's report. This is sort of analogous to a supplemental materials of a publication and it can be accessed through the URL shown on the slide. Now the slides that I'm going to show in my director's report are also available electronically at the site both as a PDF file and also as the actual PowerPoint file itself. And then for slides that are associated with specific documents or relevant webpages there's a document number in the bottom right corner of each slide which references materials that can be accessed and downloaded at the website shown here. And actually it was a crazy week last week. There are several cases you'll see during director's report where it was late breaking news and I have a little late breaking news icon because we couldn't even get it on to the into a document number yet because it was so late breaking. So you can watch for that for the first time I'm using that. And then in addition to the video archive although this web page all the link documents are archived on the institute's website genome.gov as a permanent historic record of this meeting. So other things that's going to happen during the open session include some presentations that will augment what I'm going to cover in my director's report. In fact I will not discuss in detail the topics that others are going to present. So after my director's report Dr. Lisa Parker is going to present a report from the genomics and society working group of this council. And then Dr. Terry Minnellio will then present a report on the recent workshop on research directions and Stevens-Johnson syndrome toxic epidermal necrolysis. And then after the lunch break we will once again hear from Terry Minnellio who then present an update on the genomic medicine working group of this council and then also report from the recent genomic medicine 8 meeting. And then the last presentation of the open session will be given by a guest Dr. Joe Selby of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. Joe will be talking about the complementarity of comparative effectiveness research and precision medicine. We look forward to his presentation. So this is the outline of my director's report in these seven areas. I will now cover one by one as I've done in the past starting with a general update about NHGRI. Well NHGRI lost one of its longest serving employees. Former NHGRI extramural program director Elizabeth Thompson passed away this past July. From an early career in nursing Elizabeth moved into genetic counseling and then founded the International Society of Nurses and Genetics. During her time at NHGRI which began in 1991 she championed our ethical legal and social implications or LC research program and became a valued resource for the genomics community. She was the driving force behind many LC research program initiatives from the successful and influential cystic fibrosis and cancer genetics studies research consortia of the 1990s through the current Centers of Excellence in LC Research or CER program. She'll be remembered most for her passionate support and generosity as a mentor to trainees and young investigators and we will greatly miss her. After four years serving as the chief of the policy and program analysis branch within the Division of Policy Communication and Education Dr. Derek Skolls left NHGRI in May to become vice president for public policy and government affairs at the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. While at NHGRI Derek focused much of his energy on building relationships with congressional staff and was an outstanding mentor for the four American Society of Human Genetics, ASHG, NHGRI public policy fellows that came through the Institute during his tenure. We thank Derek for his contributions and wish him the best with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Meanwhile Dr. Laura Rodriguez is currently serving as the acting chief of this branch while we conduct a search for Dr. Skoll's replacement. And as you heard Rudy introduce among the many people new to the Institute, I wanted to say a little bit more about another important leadership position within the Division of Policy Communications and Education and that's Dr. John Ohab who very recently joined our Institute as chief of the Communications and Public Liaison Branch. As you heard prior to coming to the Institute John played major leadership roles in the Strategic Communications Program for the Department of Defense, Industry Startups and most recently the Naval Research Laboratory where he served as head of communications and social media. In his most recent position he led the development of new comprehensive communications strategy including a rebranding effort in the development of an extensive social media plan. NHGRI is excited to have John take the reins of our important and very well respected communications program. I would certainly like to thank Janine Miyaset who for serving as acting chief of the branch for the last 16 months. She and the entire branch successfully maintain momentum during this period and have continued to find new and innovative ways to capture the attention of NHGRI's audience through our website, through media relations and also through video. Janine will continue to serve as the branch's deputy chief. NHGRI's Division of Policy Communications and Education partners with the American Society of Human Genetics and sponsoring two fellowships, the well-established Genetics and Public Policy Fellowship and the recently launched Genetics and Education Fellowship. This year's Genetics and Public Policy Fellow is Caroline Young. Miss Young attended Kenyon College where she majored in biology and minored in classics after which she earned a master's degree in the Johns Hopkins NHGRI Genetic Counseling Training Program just graduating this past spring. Now this will be the second year for the ASHG NHGRI Genetics and Education Fellowship and I'm pleased to report that Julie Nadel will be this year's fellow. Julie just completed her doctoral studies in genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, part of her graduate work sharing the BS in life science and neuropsychology from Penn State University and we're looking forward to working with Caroline and Julie as our new fellows. Resulting from the collective effort of literally numerous staff members, NHGRI recently published its first ever general brochure about the institute. Designed for a broad audience the new brochure features NHGRI's history, organization, core values, and research portfolio. The latter involves highlighting key institute programs across the four major scientific areas depicted here, genome structure and function, genomics and human disease, genomic medicine, and genomics and society. For those interested a PDF version of the new NHGRI brochure can be easily downloaded from our website genome.gov and printed copies are readily available as well on request. Now the NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy was released a little over a year ago in August of 2014. Now since before the policy's release, NHGRI has been preparing to implement the policy at our institute. This month we opened a series of pages on our website genome.gov that provide information for extramural and intramural researchers about NHGRI specific implementation of the NIH-wide policy. We also announced on our website two areas in which NHGRI's expectations for genomic data sharing will go beyond the minimum expectations established by the NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy. Now first, while the NIH policy specifies different data submission and release timelines for human and non-human genomic DNA or genomic data, NHGRI plans to harmonize these timelines for our funded research. For projects proposed on or after January 25th, 2016, NHGRI will expect non-human genomic data to be submitted and released according to the same timelines as human genomic data. Second, supporting the NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy's expectation for explicit consent for future research use and broad data sharing, NHGRI will require that by January 25th, 2020, all human genomic data used in NHGRI-funded or supported research will be generated from specimens or cell lines obtained with explicit consent for future research use and broad data sharing. Exceptions to this expectation will continue to be granted when there is a compelling scientific reason as allowed under the general NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy. NHGRI has established a Genomics and Health Disparities lecture series to enhance opportunities for dialogue about the role that genomics and LC research can have in addressing health disparities and inequities. Topics will range from basic science to translational and LC research. The lecture series is being co-sponsored by the NHGRI, by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, and also by the Office of Minority Health at the Food and Drug Administration. The inaugural lecture in this series was held this past May with Councilmember Dr. Carlos Luis de Monte presenting a talk entitled Opportunities and Challenges for Health Disparities Research in the Personal Genomic Era. Thank you, Carlos, for doing that, and NHGRI and our co-sponsors are currently planning the additional lectures for the upcoming year. Now, last week, NHGRI held a roundtable, actually just the building adjacent to this one, on the inclusion and engagement of underrepresented populations in genomics research. This gathering sought to bring together genomic science and health disparities researchers to discuss strategies to increase the participation of underrepresented populations in genomics research. The goals of the roundtable included, one, examining the scientific challenges that arise due to a lack of ancestral diversity in genomic studies, including the difficulty of enabling genomic science and medicine to benefit all populations. Second, identifying barriers to increasing the number of research participants from diverse ancestral populations in genomics research and strategies to overcome these barriers. And third, defining genomic science and ethical, legal, and social implications research opportunities to address health disparities and inequalities. And the report from this roundtable will be presented at the February 2016 council meeting. So, moving on to some general NIH updates. So, Dr. Alan Gutmacher recently announced that he will retire from being director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Health Development and Human Development, NICHD in October. Of course, Alan came to NHGRI originally in 1999 and was appointed as the Institute's Deputy Director a few years later. He also served as the NHGRI Acting Director before I stepped into this position. And just when I became NHGRI Director, Alan was asked to serve as NICHD's Acting Director and was later appointed its director. He's done a terrific job in this capacity for the past five years and working with Alan, we've benefited from numerous interactions with NICHD, including launching the Newborn Sequencing and Genomic Medicine in Public Health or N-Site Program. And his scientific leadership has been invaluable to NHGRI and NICHD and I think we all wish Alan all the best in his retirement. Meanwhile, Dr. Catherine Spong, who's currently the NICHD Deputy Director, will serve as the Institute's Acting Director while a search for its next permanent director is conducted. Another Institute Director transition, Dr. Walter Koroschatz, has been named the Director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, NINDS. He served as the NINDS Acting Director since October 2014. Walter came to the NIH in 2007 as the NINDS Deputy Director and among as many accomplishments, he had a significant role in the creation of StrokeNet, a national clinical trial network for research and stroke treatment prevention and recovery. He was also co-founder of the NIH Uniform Services Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine, and we look forward to working with Walter in his new capacity. Similarly, Dr. Bill Riley was recently appointed Director of the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research and Associate Director of NIH for Behavioral and Social Sciences. Before his current NIH appointment, Bill served as a Health Scientist Administrator and Deputy Director of the Division of AIDS and Health Behavior Research at the National Institute of Mental Health, who's also then, prior to that, a Program Director at the National Heart, London Blood Institute, and also Chief of the Science of Research and Technology Branch at the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at the National Cancer Institute. Another new leadership position, Dr. Petra Kaufman, has been named the Director of the Office of Rare Diseases Research, which now resides within the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, or NCANTS. This new role will be in addition to Petra's current role as Director of the NCATS Division of Clinical Innovation. Now as the Director of the Office of Rare Disease Research, Petra will actively oversee the Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network, the Global Rare Diseases Patient Registry Data Repository, and the Genetic and Rare Diseases Information Center, a long time collaboration between this office and NHGRI. Dr. Robert Isinger has been appointed the Acting Director of the NIH Office of AIDS Research, while a search for a permanent director has conducted. As I mentioned at the May Council meeting, Dr. Jack Weitzgarver stepped down from the directorship of this office in July. Another departure from NIH, Dr. Sally Rocky, has departed the NIH and her position as the Director of the NIH Office of Extramural Research, and also as Deputy Director of NIH for Extramural Research, to become the Director of the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research. Among her many accomplishments, Sally managed a successful implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act at NIH, led the focus on the biomedical research workforce, and greatly enhanced NIH's partnership and dialogue with the extramural research community. Dr. Larry Tabak, NIH Deputy Director, has agreed to take on the role of Acting Director of the NIH Office of Extramural Research, while the search for a permanent director is conducted. And then in some breaking news, from last week, Dr. Tom Insel just announced that he'll be departing as Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, NIMH, on November 1st. Tom is a great friend and colleague of NHGRIs, and he has served as the NIMH Director for 13 years. Now, Tom was initially at NIMH from 1980 to 1994, within the Institute's Intramural Research Program, and then returned as its Director in 2002. As NIMH Director, he nurtured numerous major initiatives, actually too many to possibly mention here, but his leadership has also been central to many trans-NIH and major federal efforts, including chairing the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, co-chairing the Blueprint for Neuroscience Research, co-chairing the NIH Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or Brain Initiative, and co-leading the Common Fund efforts in molecular libraries, single cell biology, and genotype tissue expression GTech program along with us. When he departs NIH, Tom will join the Google Life Sciences team at Alphabet to lead a new effort that will focus on mental health. While a national search for a new NIMH Director is conducted, Dr. Bruce Cuthbert will serve as the Institute's Acting Director. Bruce has held a number of leadership positions at NIMH, including Director of the Division of Adult Translational Research and Director of the Research Domain Criteria Unit. And in another piece of breaking news last week, Dr. Rob Califf has been nominated by President Obama to take on the role of Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Upon Senate confirmation, Dr. Califf will take over for current Acting FDA Commissioner, Dr. Stephen Ostraff, who has been serving in that position since Dr. Peggy Hamburg departed in March. Now, Rob will inherit the agency, along with a number of important current initiatives, including his overhaul of the regulation of electronic cigarettes, biosimilar drugs, and food safety. A well-known figure in medicine is a cardiologist researcher and a professor at Duke University. Rob has been associated with the FDA since February when he became the Deputy Commissioner for Medical Products and Tobacco. Now, related to an important NIH leadership position, you may recall that over the last year, I co-chaired a working group of the advisory committee to the NIH director that was asked to articulate a renewed vision for the National Library of Medicine, or NLM. Now, this working group was constituted following the retirement of NLM's long-standing director, Dr. Don Lindbergh, but prior to the recruitment of a new director for NLM. Now, the working group was charged with reviewing the mission organization and programmatic priorities of the NLM and articulating the strategic vision for NLM in order to ensure its continued leadership in biomedical and health information. Now, the working group presented its final report for consideration at the June meeting of the advisory committee to the NIH director where it was unanimously approved by the committee and accepted by Francis Collins, the NIH director. Of note, the report describes a vision for NLM as a unifying force in biomedicine that promotes and accelerates knowledge generation to dissemination and understanding in the U.S. and internationally. It also calls for the NLM to be the intellectual and programmatic epicenter for data science at NIH. Now, following his acceptance of the report, Dr. Francis Collins immediately launched a search for the next NLM director asking me and Dr. John Lorch, director of the National Institute for General Medical Sciences, to co-chair the search committee. Now, that search is active with the first evaluation of applications to take place shortly after the initial application deadline of October 21st. And anyone interested in applying for this important NIH leadership position, which has, I think, important interactions and future interactions with NHRI should really feel free to contact me directly. Now, as part of the fiscal year 2015 Cromnebis appropriation enacted last December, Congress included language requesting that NIH submit, quote, an NIH-wide five-year strategic plan no later than one year after enactment, end of quote. Now, additionally, the 21st Century Cures Act, which is a bill that is currently pending in Congress and hopefully will pass sometime in the coming year, also includes language that instructs NIH to maintain a five-year biomedical research strategic plan, which includes identifying strategic focus areas that were considered researchers return on investment. Well, with such congressional requirement, it means NIH is now busy working to develop a new strategic plan to span the work of the entire agency aiming to meet the deadline of having such a plan completed by December. Specifically, NIH is developing a living document to help guide the agency in fulfilling its mission over the next five years. Now, the plan is intended to articulate the highest priorities across the NIH research portfolio, highlighting how NIH will achieve these priorities. It's not intended to describe all of the many important things that NIH does and will do in the future, nor to address priorities of specific institutes and centers, especially since many of those institutes and centers have their own strategic plans that will be referenced in the executive summary of the broader NIH plan. Now, the framework for the new NIH strategic plan is organized into three sections, an overview, areas of opportunity, and unifying principles. Each section includes broad trans-NIH opportunities and priorities. This framework was designed by NIH including input from the advisory committee to the NIH director, and based on this framework, the strategic plan is being developed through a working group of institute and center representatives. Now, a more complete set of slides with further details about this strategic planning process and its framework is available actually as document 15 with my director's report. We didn't want to go through all those slides, but if you're interested in drilling deeper into what is going on with this NIH-wide strategic planning effort, I'd refer you to that slide set associated with document 15. And this summer, this past summer, public input regarding the framework was collected through a request for information which received 460 responses. Three webinars were also held in August with over 700 participants, and the strategic strategic plan will be presented to the advisory committee to the NIH director in early December and then delivered to Congress by mid December. NIH continues its efforts to enhance rigor and reproducibility and scientific research. The main goal is to clarify NIH's longstanding expectations regarding rigor and transparency and how we would like to see this described in grant application. Now, recently NIH notified the research community of plans to incorporate rigor and transparency in grant applications and review through the issuance of two guide notices. So, the first notice which was called enhancing reproducibility through rigor and transparency provides information to clarify NIH expectations in four areas covered in grant applications, scientific premise, rigorous experimental design, consideration of relevant biological variables such as sex, and authentication of key biological and or chemical resources. Now, the second notice provides additional information regarding the consideration of sex as a biological variable in NIH funded research. Now, pending approval by the office of management and budget, the policy will go into effect for applications due January 25th, 2016 and beyond. Instructions for applicants will be available in this coming fall. Moving on to legislation, the 21st Century Cures Bill, HR6, was passed by the House of Representatives on July 10. In very general terms, the bill boosts NIH research and reforms NIH FDA's regulatory framework so as to accelerate the discovery, development, delivery of cures. Now, more specifically, the bill authorizes 4% annual increases in the NIH budget for fiscal years 2016 to 2018 and establishes an NIH and Cures Innovation Fund, which would provide an additional $1.86 billion annually to NIH for fiscal years 2016 to 2020. Now, as I mentioned earlier, the bill would also require the NIH to create five-year strategic research plans. Now, the House bill also identifies several strategic focus areas for research. These include biomarkers, precision medicine, infectious diseases, and antibiotics. Finally, each NIH Institute and Center would be mandated to spend a percentage of its budget on high-risk, high-reward research, and this percentage would be determined by the NIH Director. Now, meanwhile, the Senate has been developing its own vision for biomedical research reform and stimulation, referring to it as Innovations Bill, but a draft has not yet been released, therefore, any proposals to alter the NIH budget or proposals for regulatory reform are subject to change. So, in summary, there's both excitement and uncertainty with respect to the potential of a major NIH-enhancing bill becoming law, and we're obviously following these developments very carefully, especially as we approach the end of this fiscal year and the beginning of next fiscal year, which nicely brings me to my next slide, looking ahead to fiscal year 2016 and the budget. Well, the summer months have not seen the ideal federal budget process progress, and it is expected that in the continuing resolution will be necessary to fund the government into the next fiscal year. As shown here, the House Labor HHS Appropriation Subcommittee has approved a funding bill that includes a 3.3% increase for NIH and a 3.4% increase for NHGRI. The center's counterpart has approved a 6% increase for NIH and a 4.4% increase for NHGRI. These increases would be significantly larger than the previous fiscal year and others that we have seen in recent budget cycles. However, neither chamber's full appropriations committee has yet taken up these bills, and as you know, if Congress does not pass a budget or a continuing resolution by October 1, the government will shut down. Meanwhile, the President's budget request, as well as the current House and Senate bills, contain a little over $200 million of new funds for the Precision Medicine Initiative, which I'll be discussing in greater detail later in my director's report. Well, in May, senators Richard Durbin and Lindsey Graham held an event to announce a new congressional NIH caucus. The goal of this caucus is to increase the purchasing power that NIH has lost in the last several years and provide steady, predictable growth for biomedical research in the future. In addition, caucus members hope to shine a light on what the NIH does in forming the American taxpayer that NIH represents a great return on investment. The Senate caucus consists of a bipartisan group of 23 senators and is co-chaired by Senators Durbin and Graham. The House caucus consists of a bipartisan group of 17 representatives and is co-chaired by representatives Higgins, King and DeLaria. So moving away from politics maybe and back into genomics. Starting with some sad news that NHGRI grantee friend and colleague, Dr. Bill Gelbart passed away in August. Bill was professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University and was a principal investigator of FlyBase since 1991. His laboratory focused on understanding the molecular basis of pattern formation in higher animals. Bill was also served as a member of this group, the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research and was a long-standing member and most recently the chair of the NHGRI sequencing advisory panel. He was a prototypic colleague of the institute and a well-respected member of the genomics community. He was a true friend, a collaborator, a mentor to many of us here at NHGRI and I will just tell you he will be greatly missed. I'm also saddened to report that Dr. Eric Davidson passed away earlier this month. Eric was a long-time professor of cell biology at Caltech who greatly contributed to our understanding of the genomics of gene regulation and the importance of gene regulatory networks. He led the effort with others to derive the complete genome sequence of the purple seat urchin which was a and it was a key participant in a number of important NHGRI meetings and planning sessions over the years especially those related to comparative genomics. And happier news in terms of highlights about major figures in the genomics community and good NHGRI colleagues. Former council member Dr. Jill Mizorov has been appointed associate vice chancellor for computational health sciences and professor of medicine at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center. And at this council table just two weeks ago it was announced that council member Dr. Carlos Bustamante has been appointed the inaugural chair of the Stanford Department of Biomedical Data Science. Congratulations Carlos. And finally a number of genomicists are among the 26 scientists selected as new investigators of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, HHMI. These include Drs. Job Decker, Levi Garouy, Garouy, Partis Sabeti, and council member Jay Shinduri. Congratulations Jay. In July the American Society of Human Genetics, ASHA, released an updated report on the ethical, legal, and psychosocial implications of genetic testing in children and adolescents. Now this report was a follow-up to ASHA's previous 1995 position statement about this area, but this new statement was developed in light of the rapid advances in genomic technologies over the last 20 years. The report provides recommendations on numerous issues related to genetic testing including predictive testing, return of secondary findings, and professional education. And then just last week ASHA released a statement of support for state licensure of certified genetic counselors to help ensure that the public has access to the provision of genetic and genomic services by qualified health professionals. The licensing of genetic counselors also enables many hospitals to approve billing and reimbursement for counseling services. 15 states currently issue such licenses and ASHA's statement encourages the remaining states to move forward in a similar fashion. Well in a celebratory mode, in precisely 10 days, 10 days from today, there'll be an important odometer moment for the field of genomics. October 1, 2015, will mark the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Human Genome Project. I know I don't need to tell this audience how this remarkable endeavor changed so many aspects of biomedical research and paved the way for other high-impact big biology projects. Well to celebrate this important milestone to help us reflect on the past quarter century of progress in genomics, NHGRI's History of Genomics program will be hosting a monthly seminar series on the NIH campus that features Human Genome Project participants who'll be sharing their perspectives about the project and how it affected their careers. The series is actually going to kick off in December with a panel discussion that will include the key NHGRI leadership during the Human Genome Project, specifically Drs. Francis Collins, Elka Jordan and Mark Geier. Other confirmed speakers that will follow in early 2016 include Drs. Maynard Olson, Ewan Burney, Bob Cook-Degan, Marco Mara, and David Bentley. The lectures are going to be video recorded and made available on our Genome TV channel of YouTube, and the NHGRI History of Genomics program will also conduct oral history interviews with all the presenters and add these to our growing historical archives. Featured as an NHGRI genome advance of the month since last council meeting have been publications examining genomic aspects of sun exposure on skin, treating inherited blindness, incorporating gene disease, association data into drug development, and gene therapy for hearing loss. And as always we have to tell you about genomes in the news and as always there's been a number of recently generated genome sequences reported since the last council meeting. I'm sure you're aware of all these but let me just summarize them quickly. The Western camel, ancient Eurasian genomes, the blow fly, the octopus, kiwi, tenowic man, sea anemone, and barley, an ancient Liberian, 99 Ebola genomes from the recent outbreak, and 2,500 Icelanders adding to our growing collection of genomic sequence data. Moving on to our extramural research program we did something fun in July, I think of an important day for the institute, the extramural research program hosted an NHGRI retreat that examined the institute's 2011 strategic plan, charting a course for genomic medicine from base pairs to bedside, and we specifically were considering how well that document reflects the current opportunities and priorities for NHGRI's genomics research portfolio. Using the original five strategic domains of the plan as the organizing framework, we have staff work to identify scientific gaps opportunities that were not addressed in the 2011 document, also shifting priorities for the goals described in the plan and also to try to think about new barriers and new challenges. This actually proved to be a very rigorous and fruitful discussion, engaging individuals from really all parts of the institute. I think this retreat really helped us to organize our thinking about how to monitor progress going forward in consideration of establishing when it would be appropriate to launch a larger strategic planning effort, recall we did one leading up to the 2011 plan, the previous one was leading up to the 2003 plan. I think the overall take home themes from this retreat were that, first of all, the 2011 strategic plan still accurately captures the highest priorities for research for the institute. And that second of all, I think we can wait at least a couple of years before launching a new strategic planning process, although we'll certainly continue to monitor that, knowing that at some point in the coming years we'll want to have another such strategic planning process conducted. Well, moving to our genome sequencing program as this council is well aware, the NHGRI genome sequencing program is in the midst of various changes as part of its renewal. The three components of the new program that have seen applications received and reviewed with associated funding plans to be discussed during the closed session of this council meeting are shown here. These components are the new centers for common disease genomics program, the centers for Mendelian genomics program, and the new coordinating center. Now funding opportunity announcements, FOAs, were also issued for two additional new components, the genome sequencing program analysis centers and the high quality human and non-human primate genome sequences. Letters of intent have now been received in response to these FOAs and we look forward to the next stage of standing up these two new elements of our overall genome sequencing program. Meanwhile, our existing genome sequencing program continues to be highly productive. One element of it is the cancer genome atlas which is a coordinated effort to better understand the molecular basis of cancer. Data production including whole exome sequencing on over 10,000 tumor normal pairs and whole genome sequencing on over a thousand tumor normal pairs has been completed. TCGA is currently focused on data analysis and manuscript writing. For each of over 30 cancer types the TCGA network has published a comprehensive integrated account of sequence mutation analysis copy number variation gene and micro RNA expression and promoter methylation. TCGA papers focused on cutaneous melanomas shown here and also lower grade gliomas shown here as well were published this July in Cell and the New England Journal of Medicine respectively. Papers provide new insights into classification of tumors in a clinical setting. TCGA looks forward to publishing more papers in the coming year as the project comes to a close next year. Moving on to a different part of our genome sequencing program the Centers for Mendelian Genomics or CMGs were launched in November 2011 aiming to find as many causal genes for Mendelian diseases and traits or Mendelian phenotypes as possible. To date the CMGs have been responsible for discovering over 1500 causal genes for Mendelian phenotypes of which greater than 590 are novel in that they had not previously been associated with any Mendelian phenotype. A subset of those discoveries have now been reported in over 195 publications. Besides making direct contributions to finding causal genes the Centers help genetics researchers work on similar phenotypes stay connected. Now Gene Matcher is a software tool developed in December of 2013 that facilitates matching and connecting researchers with a shared interest in a candidate gene or genes and this can speed up causal gene discoveries. And Gene Matcher is now used by over 600 users from 43 countries and this graph shows the rapid growth of the user community and matches made. So for example by August 1 of this year 560 matches had been made out of the 2658 genes submitted to the program. Recently the CMGs published a review article in the American Journal of Human Genetics that reported the CMGs progress on causal gene discoveries method improvement and also resource sharing. The article also debuted a scorecard that shows progress towards the goal of finding all causal genes from Mendelian phenotypes. Now the upper panel of the scorecard shows the proportion of Mendelian phenotypes for which causal genes have been identified 57% to date. The lower panel shows the proportion of human genes that have been identified to be causal for a Mendelian phenotype 15% in this case so far. Now based on information in the scorecard and the growing number of newly identified or newly defined Mendelian phenotypes on the CMGs growing number on the CMGs concluded that a large number of novel causal genes remain to be discovered. Now improvements in phenotyping genome sequencing and analysis and worldwide coordination are needed to discover the remaining causal genes. And the scorecard is now posted on CMGs website and will be updated periodically. Moving to another component of our genome sequencing program the clinical sequence and exploratory research or CSER program focuses on the integration of genome sequencing into the clinical workflow including the generation interpretation and clinical reporting of genomic information. CSER is now enrolled nearly 2,900 adults and almost 800 children nearly 3,000 of whom have had germline genome sequencing data generated and over 500 of whom have had tumor genome sequence data generated. Now as one measure of overall impact CSER has generated 161 publications including 12 cross CSER working group publications. Two of these were recently published working group papers that I'll highlight. One is a joint CSER and a merge paper that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. This paper surveyed CSER and a merge sites about current and recommended display of genomic information and electronic health records and then the CSER pediatrics working group has a paper in press at pediatrics that discusses a disclosure of genome sequencing results in pediatric practice. Now in September 28th the CSER and beyond meeting will take place in the Bethesda area. As this council is aware this meeting is charged with evaluating key contributions of the CSER program to date and prioritizing future scientific opportunities to integrate genome sequencing into clinical care. The meeting will be webcast live and archived on our Genome TV channel of YouTube. The next component of our genome sequencing program I want to highlight is the Genome Sequencing Informatics Tools GSIT program which is known publicly by the name ICIC Tools. The six funded GSIT projects have the mission to democratize genome analysis by providing researcher friendly sequence analysis tools to users outside of large genome centers. Now the GSIT program relies on three approaches robust software engineering and make tools reliable and easy to use engaging users with support documentation and outreach and finally taking advantage of innovative technologies such as the cloud and fast interactive app frameworks. Two metrics of the impact of ICIC Tools are one the number of users who actively engage in discussions and two automatic reporting directly from the software. So for example there are now over 20,000 registered users of the Broad Institute's GATK software with steady growth from 2012 when GSIT support began. These users include a large proportion of academic institutions and smaller proportions of commercial and government users as illustrated in the graph. In 2015 the GATK forum has each month typically hosted about 650 users and about 150 discussions and has had over about 100,000 page views. Moving on NHGRI's technology development program currently has funding opportunities at different stages of solicitation and drafting process. So RFAs for novel nucleic acid sequencing technologies for both DNA and direct RNA sequencing were released in August with three due dates of October 27, 2015 July 14, 2016 and July 15 of 2017. Meanwhile funding opportunity announcements or FOAs for the remaining more general genome technology development concepts will be released soon. Moving on to ENCODE the goal of the encyclopedia of DNA elements project is to create catalogs of all functional elements in the human and mouse genomes and to make those catalogs as a resource to the biomedical community. ENCODE held a community users meeting this summer that attracted about 200 participants from outside of ENCODE who heard a distinguished panel of researchers describe how they use ENCODE data in their work. Attendees also took part a series of hands-on workshops to learn how to use ENCODE data in their own research culminating with participants simultaneously running ENCODE data processing pipelines on a cloud-based platform. Workshop videos and slides are now available online and feedback from the participants was overwhelmingly positive and discussions are therefore underway for a second users meeting in 2016. Now the ENCODE portal infrastructure one of the key ENCODE data coordination center deliverables is being used by the ClinGen resource as the basis for their curation and portal interface. This demonstrates efficiencies being achieved by cooperation across NHGRI projects. Now at our May 2015 meeting Council approved four concepts for RFAs and functional genomics to build on work currently supported by ENCODE. For budgetary and scientific reasons we have postponed those initiatives by one Council round moving them from an ultimate review by Council in May of 2016 to such a review now to happen in September of 2016. NHGRI anticipates that RFAs will be issued soon. Meanwhile, ENCODE data continues to be heavily used. There are about 1200 community publications see the blue bars in this graph from groups without ENCODE funding who use ENCODE data for their studies. Further ENCODE consortium members have published about 496 consortium publications shown in purple bars. In addition to the use of ENCODE data in studies of cancer gene regulation and psychiatric immune cardiovascular metabolic disorders recent papers also used ENCODE data in the study of susceptibility to HIV and other viruses the genetics of caffeine habituation and human adaptation to tropical forests. Now many whole genome sequences will be generated in the coming years but a major problem is that we do not know how to interpret most of those genomic variants especially in non-coding regions. Some of those non-coding variants have been associated with human disease. So the goal of a new suite of NHGRI functional genomic variation grants associated with our recent RFA in this area is to develop approaches that integrate functional data sets to narrow the set of genomic variants and infer possible causal variants. The computational predictions will be assessed with experimental data. Now all the data and methods will be released to allow other researchers to compare methods. Six grant awards were recently made on the first set of applications in response to this RFA including one made actually by the NCI to council member Dr. Jason Dury. The second set of applications will be considered by council at the February 2016 meeting. Now the proposed approaches will use many types of information transcripts, transcription factor binding, nucleosomes, enhancers, DNA shape, conservation and phenotypes including ENCOG-TEX and 1000 Genomes data. These funded grants will study autism cancer, bipolar disorder, type 2 diabetes and age-related macular degeneration. Two new centers for excellence in genomic science or SEGs have been awarded. The goal of the SEGs at Harvard Medical School led by Dr. George Church is to develop and apply new methods for in situ single cell profiling of RNA protein and epigenetic marks in intact tissue and in engineered tissue. Novel algorithms to analyze in situ spatial patterning and pathway activity profiles will be developed as well as methods to write spatial patterns of omic alterations in the context of engineered tissues. The new SEGs at the University of Washington led by Dr. John Stam seeks to enable dynamic imaging of gene regulatory regions and chromatin organization thus revealing gene activity and functional state at single molecule resolution within intact single cells at high throughput. The trajectory is to apply these technologies for research and lay a foundation for their use in clinical diagnostic. The annual SEGs grantee meeting will be held in November and hosted by the SEGs led by Dr. Zach Kohane. Finally, new SEGs applications are due in May 2016 and potential applicants should be contacting program staff within the next couple of months. Moving on to the electronic medical records and genomics network or EMERGE which conducts genomic discovery and clinical implementation research by leveraging data from large biorepositories linked to electronic medical records. EMERGE recently finished its second phase and to date it has completed and published 531 total projects. EMERGE publications have been cited nearly 9,300 times with over 8,300 citations from phase two alone. The network has also developed an impressive set of tools, methods and software that are being widely shared with the scientific community. Well EMERGE has now begun phase three with 12 awards, nine to investigative sites, two to genome sequencing and genotyping centers and one to a coordinating center. EMERGE 3 will run from September 1st, 2015 to May 31st, 2019. It aims to expand on best practices and knowledge and effective implementation of genomic medicine to define health outcomes associated with rare genomic variants in approximately 100 clinically relevant genes and potentially in broader exome and genome sequence data in later years. In code 3 will detect rare variants presumed to affect gene function and assess the phenotypic implications of these variants by leveraging well-validated EMR data. It will also report actionable variants to patients and clinicians to improve clinical care and ultimately health outcomes. Further it will assess the health impact cost effectiveness and ethical legal and social implications of reporting genomic variants on a broader population scale for patients, clinicians, and healthcare institutions while continuing efforts to improve electronic phenotyping. Lastly it will provide electronic clinical decision support enabling an integration of genomic information into EMRs for clinical research and care. The phenotypes and exposure or Phoenix toolkit has produced an online resource of standard measures for capturing data on common diseases, phenotypic traits, and environmental exposures. 80 new measures have been added to the Phoenix toolkit since February bringing the total number of standard measures to nearly 500. These new measures are focused on areas such as obesity, eating disorders, and tobacco regulatory research. To further promote uptake of Phoenix measures, investigators can now access all Phoenix measures in red cap a secure web application for building and managing online surveys and databases. Red cap is an integral part of the NIH clinical and translation science award or CTSA program and is used by thousands of researchers. Now you might recall that NHLBI provided fiscal year 2015 funds to launch a Phoenix sickle cell disease effort. This work is now complete and the new collection of measures was launched during the NHLBI's annual sickle cell disease clinical research meeting held at NIH last month. And lastly, Phoenix will be featured at the ASHG annual meeting in an invited session entitled Human Phenotypes for Researchers, Clinicians, and Patient. The clinical genome or ClinGen resource designed to build an authoritative central resource that defines the clinical relevance of genomic variance for use in precision medicine and research has made significant progress during the second year of this highly collaborative program. ClinGen's marker paper which describes project goals and progress was published in the New England Journal of Medicine this past July and the paper was accompanied by an editorial highlighting the importance of broad data sharing and collaborative curation efforts such as that provided by ClinGen that helps to make sense of the rapidly accumulating genome sequence data. Now ClinGen's actionability working group led by Drs. Jim Evans and Katrina Goddard have nearly completed scoring the clinical actionability of the 56 genes on the ACMG secondary findings list. A subset of the evidence reports and scores for the genetic condition shown here are already available on ClinGen's public website with the rest being posted before the annual ASHG meeting. And meanwhile, ClinGen will have high visibility about the ASHG and the National Society of Genetic Counselors meetings this fall. At the ASHG meeting, for example, ClinGen will hold an interactive workshop that overviews ClinGen tools and frameworks for curating the clinical significance of genes and genomic variants. The Genomics and Society working group of this council is charged with providing advice on short and long-term planning and priority setting for the Genomics and Society activities of the Institute. The working group held its annual in-person meeting in April. And the working group chair, Dr. Lisa Parker is going to provide an update about the working group later in the open session of this council meeting. Now NHGRI provides about $12 million in small business grants annually. And our current Small Business Innovation Research or SBIR and Small Business Technology Transfer STTR portfolio funds 18 phase one, which are proof of principle, and 12 phase two, which are pre-commercialization awards. New phase two efforts include single cell analysis at cellular research and mission bio, next generation DNA sequencing innovations at dovetail genomics, sage science, pressure bioscience, and genapsis, all of the nucleotide synthesis advancements at McDonald Research and PharmaSeq, and novel CMOS hybridization detection technologies at Incilexa. These small business grants are drawn from an increasingly stronger and competitive application pool. Our next Small Business Grant Funding will be increasing by about $6.6 million each of the next two years. And we've been actively encouraging small businesses to apply by reaching out to the community and by targeting recent applicants and grantees. And we really hope that our council will help get the word out about this NIH-wide opportunity for small businesses, many of which spring out of academic and research laboratories. And finally, to talk a bit about training and career development, NHGRI is a long-term commitment to repairing the next generation of genomic scientists and scholars and continues to enhance our investment in research, training, and career development programs. Therefore, it is important to ensure that NHGRI provides first career enhancing activities and second accountability by developing tools to track the career paths of participants, trainees, and career awardees. Well, in 2009, we awarded the first data analysis of Coordinating Center to assist grantees and NHGRI in tracking the progress of mainly participants in our Diversity Action Plan program. And at the last meeting, council approved a concept for continuation of a Coordinating Center for the training program. And the open competition RFA for this Coordinating Center has now been issued. The main focus of the reissued RFA is to maintain, improve, and or develop a training database and to collect and analyze data about trainee career paths. The Coordinating Center will also provide logistical support for an expanding, expanded annual program meeting. The expansion of these activities will encompass all of our training, career development, and diversity action plan programs. And these include activities of all three of NHGRI's extramural programmatic divisions. And applications in response to this RFA are due October 20th next month. Okay, so moving beyond NHGRI and now talking about NIH Common Fund and also TransNIH efforts. We'll start with the Knockout Mouse phenotyping project, COM 2, which was launched in 2011 with the goal of making and phenotyping 2,500-mouse knockout strains over five years. The project is on track to meet its goal in the fall of 2016. The project was approved for continuation by the NIH Common Fund and thus will finish the final five years of the standard 10-year Common Fund project lifespan. The plan is for the NIH Common Fund to match the funds provided by other NIH Institute Centers and Offices and in total there will be 18 Institute Centers and Offices contributing funds to the next phase of the program for a total of roughly $100 million of funding over the next five years. And the funding opportunity announcements or FOAs are being developed for publication in the NIH Guide. The program is planning to continue broad-based phenotyping of knockout mice in collaboration with our international partners through the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium. The Library of Integrated Network-Based Cellular Signatures or LINX program aims to create a network-based understanding of biology by cataloging changes in gene expression and other cellular processes that occur when cells are exposed to a variety of perturbing agents. LINX uses computational tools to integrate this diverse information into a comprehensive view of normal and disease states that can be applied for the development of new biomarkers and therapeutics. Major elements of recent progress include the public release of data and harmonized metadata. There have also been multiple internal collaborative projects as well as LINX-wide joint working groups on assay development and data standards. With the aim of expanding the scope and relevance of the LINX data and tools the program solicited supplemental requests for relevant grants from other institutes and centers, 15 supplemental requests were received and after a rigorous programmatic review eight collaborations will be supported. The awards are one-year supplements with 50-50 co-funding by LINX and the indicated entities on the third bullet. The Genotype Tissue Expression or G-TEX project is an NIH common fund study that aims to provide a comprehensive gene expression atlas. This will provide insight into the mechanisms of gene regulation and aid in the interpretation of genome-wide association studies. In August of 2015, G-TEX reached its goal of 900 donors because of efficiencies that have been realized the program may be able to enroll an additional 50 to 60 more donors. Analysis of the samples and data will continue for another 18 months. The new G-TEX portal has been released and features updated visualization tools. The version 5 data release occurred in June and includes data from over 9,000 RNA samples. The next version of the data is expected in the fall with the release of matching genotype data from about 450 donors or half of the total donors in the project so far. Moving on, the goals of the protein capture reagents program are to pilot a community resource of low-cost, high-quality, renewable affinity reagents for high trends for human transcription factors and to develop technologies for next generation platforms. The program has successfully produced about 1100 validated monoclonal and recombinant antibodies to 370 human transcription factors. These antibodies are available for affordable purchase through the protein capture data portal. The program is near the end of its pilot phase with one remaining grantee at Johns Hopkins University finishing production of mouse monoclonals and custom designed immunologics, a subcontractor of the Johns Hopkins base in Puerto Rico was recently invited to participate in a White House demo day in exhibition that showcased the wide-ranging talents of innovators from across the United States and its territory. The human heredity and health in Africa or H3Africa's central goal is to develop a sustainable and collaborative African genetics and genomics research enterprise. Next month, the 7th H3Africa Consortium Meeting will be held in Washington, D.C. Several events will augment the main meeting including an ancillary H3Africa session at the ASHG annual meeting in Baltimore which will occur immediately before the H3Africa Consortium Meeting and a full day of H3Africa presentations on the NIH campus. Another meeting will bring together researchers involved in planning the U.S. Precision Medicine Initiative with H3Africa investigators and other consortia to discuss strategies for inclusion of traditionally underserved communities in biomedical research. This year, two more biorepositories will be scaled up and begin receiving, storing and sharing DNA samples. The addition of these biorepositories means that H3Africa will have sample storage facilities across sub-Saharan Africa, one in the east, one in the west, and one in the south. And H3Africa has been given the approval from the NIH Common Fund to plan for a phase two which will extend the program for an additional five years. NIH program staff are working on details of the proposal which will be presented to this council at our main meeting. The NIH Common Fund's Undiagnosed Diseases Network or UDN aims to improve the level of diagnosis and care for patients with undiagnosed diseases, facilitate research into the etiology of these diseases, and create an integrated and collaborative research community to identify and share improved options for optimal patient management. And this September, the UDN launched its online patient application portal called the UDN Gateway and is now accepting patients at all seven UDN clinical sites across the country. For access to the UDN Gateway, anyone can click on the Apply button which is located on any of the UDN web pages. And meanwhile, six gene function research or R21 awards for the UDN were made this summer. As you can see from the table, these six studies will investigate the underlying genetics, biochemistry, and or pathophysiology of newly diagnosed diseases in association with gene variants identified through the NIH UDN. In many cases, using model organisms and cell culture systems. Yet another initiative, the Gabriella Miller Kids First Pediatric Research Act was passed by Congress in March of 2014 and signed into law by President Obama in April of 2014. Now the purpose of this act is to eliminate taxpayer financing of political conventions and repurpose those funds for a 10 year pediatric research initiative. These funds at $12.6 million per year for 10 years are now designated for an NIH Common Fund program referred to as Kids First. The program aims to develop a data resource for the pediatric research community of well curated clinical and genome sequence data. The major focus will be on cancers with an inherited basis and on relapse and treatment resistant tumors as well as on structural birth defects. A program announcement was released in fiscal year 2015 seeking samples for genome sequencing. The goal for the current year is the production of whole genome sequences from up to 6,000 samples. In early fiscal year 2016 the program will release more funding opportunity announcements for the creation of a data resource so that sequence data are both useful and accessible to researchers, solicitation of additional samples, and generation of additional genome sequence data. Moving on to trans-NIH initiatives, the big data to knowledge or BD2K initiative is a trans-NIH data science effort that aims to transform the ability of scientists to take advantage of data resources and software in biomedical and translational research. Among a wide range of ongoing BD2K activities NHGRI staff have been most actively involved in the following programs. BD2K is making a major investment to enhance the training of the next generation of biomedical researchers in computational, statistical, and data science skills. Part of that next generation is shown on this slide. Several funding opportunities are available to researchers and new training awards will be announced soon. Recently BD2K funded 15 grants to develop software in targeted research areas, including data compression and visualization. Among the open BD2K funding opportunities is one for the development of software tools and methods in the areas of data privacy, data repurposing, and applications of metadata. And a number of BD2K administrative supplement programs are in process to support data sharing, discovery, and interoperability of data sets across databases. And the supplement awards will be announced soon. Now, as expected, planning for the recently announced precision medicine initiative reached a frenetic pace over the summer with hopes to launch the high-profile initiative in fiscal year 2016, which means as early as October 1st if we have a budget. NIH has been active on multiple fronts to prepare for this important new program. Now, as I mentioned previously, NIH is doing an excellent job of capturing and disseminating information about the precision medicine initiative planning activities via this dedicated webpage which is easy to remember www.nih.gov backslash precision medicine. I would strongly urge you to regularly go to the site to get the latest information about the initiative. I'm certain that this will continue to be the place to go to to inform you about plans for the initiative future meetings, funding opportunities, and so forth. Well, recall that last spring Dr. Francis Collins appointed a working group of the NIH advisory committee to the director to develop a vision and a plan for the U.S. national research cohort component of the precision medicine initiative. Since the May Council meeting that working group has held three more public workshops to assist them in developing that plan. Council member Jason Dury has been a member of that working group. Specifically, there have been workshops on digital health in the million person precision medicine initiative cohort held in late May. A participant engagement and health equity workshop held in early July and mobile and personal technologies in precision medicine workshop held in late July. And as with the earlier workshop these events were video cast live and there was a very active Twitter stream associated with each. And in addition, I can tell you that video recordings in various relevant documents including summaries from those workshops are now available on this precision medicine website. If you click under events it takes you to this page and they just want to emphasize a lot of information is there about all those workshops. Now, really the most important development with respect to precision medicine initiative since President Obama's announcement in January actually occurred last week specifically the NIH advisory committee to the director working group on the precision medicine initiative released its report during the September 17 public teleconference meeting of the advisory committee to the director. This lengthy and detailed report shown on the left with an accompanying press release shown on the right provides many important recommendations and articulates a clear early vision for the development of the U.S. national research cohort. And I would strongly urge you to look at this report to get lots of information about the conclusions of the working group following discussion by his advisory committee Dr. Francis Collins accepted the report. And yet in more breaking news from last week Dr. Francis Collins also announced that Dr. Josie Briggs who serves currently as director of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health will immediately assume the role as interim director of the precision medicine initiative cohort program. Josie will serve in this capacity until a permanent director is identified with the search for that individual beginning in the very near future. You know I and other NHGRI staff who have been involved in planning efforts for the U.S. national research cohort component of the precision medicine initiative look forward to working with Josie we already are working with Josie and we as we to gather shift from the planning stage to the implementation stage of the initiative. Now there's so many details to be worked out and all of this needs to happen on a very fast pace but as I mentioned before I fully expect that I will be regularly updating council about developments with the precision medicine initiative. Then highly relevant to the precision medicine initiative is an important development related to the common rule for protecting human subjects and research. And on September 2nd the Department of Health and Human Services announced the notice of proposed rulemaking to revise the common rule. The proposed rule is now open for public comment through December 7th the proposed revisions aim to bring the regulatory provisions for protecting human research participants in line with the changing nature of research since the common rules original publication in 1991. Specific changes aim to better protect and respect participants of research while streamlining research oversight and decreasing ambiguity for responsible parties. Major proposed revisions include improving informed consent processes with shorter and clearer consent forms calibrating the level of review for studies with the risks posed through new exclusions and exemptions requiring informed consent for the secondary use of biospecimens through for example broad consent for future unspecified research and new data security and information protection standards to promote privacy and confidentiality. In addition, proposed revisions aim to streamline IRB review and extend protection to all research performed at sites that receive federal funding for human subjects research. This proposed rule and its call for public comment is incredibly important opportunity and I encourage anyone and everyone to consider these proposals and provide comments. So moving on to our division of policy communications and education the MINK study which stands for method for introducing a new competency is a collaborative project led by Dr. Jean Jenkins of the NHGRI Genomic Health Care Branch Dr. Kathy Calzone of the NCI and Laura Badzek of West Virginia University. Now MINK was a long a year long genomic education intervention that trains supported and supervised institutional educator and administrator dyads in 21 magnet hospitals to increase the capacity to integrate genomics that's the competency in this case into clinical nursing practice. A group of these dyad members was brought together in June to share information learn from the collective experience. At this meeting the group also began to design a toolkit to promote genomic practice capture the expertise and processes and collect resources assembled by the magnet hospital dyads participating in the study. They also initiated plans for dissemination of this work. Now the toolkit will be launched as a website and added to the many other genomics resources for healthcare providers that the genomic health care branch maintains. The homepage design has been created, reviewed and plans for development are well underway as expected that the toolkit will remain under construction for 2015 with a launch plan for early 2016. Now the genetic and rare diseases information center or GARD which I actually mentioned earlier was established by NHGRI and the then Office of Rare Diseases Research which is now within the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences or NCAPS. Now the goal of GARD is to help the public find useful information about genetic and rare diseases. GARD information of specialists provide current and accurate information about genetic and rare diseases in both English and Spanish through phone inquiries and via the web. In April of 2015 GARD collaborated with the NHGRI Communications and Public Liaison Branch to present updated advice through a series of videos on topics such as how to find a specialist finding treatment and getting involved with research. For the first time GARD also included a comprehensive overview in Spanish. These videos can be accessed through the main and underlying GARD pages on genome.gov as well as the NCAPS YouTube page. As of earlier this month these videos have been viewed over 1300 times. Meanwhile the NHGRI Communications and Public Liaison Branch continues to share written and visual information about the Institute's Initiative Studies and funding opportunities with larger and more diverse audiences through the use of social media. Outlets such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube remain the primary portals for disseminating this information. NHGRI currently hosts two Facebook pages, two Twitter accounts, a YouTube channel and a live stream account used to webcast events such as this council meeting. So for context I thought I would share with you some numbers. So as of earlier this month the genome.gov Facebook account had about 86,000 likes, a 64% increase over last year and the genome.gov Twitter account had over 18,000 followers, a 52% increase over last year. Our DNA Day Facebook account garnered about 41,000 likes, a 77% increase over last year with the DNA Day Twitter account seeing a 7.2% increase over last year to a total of about 8,000 followers. Now our Genome TV channel of YouTube currently features about 1,266 videos, 248 of which were added in 2015 and the channel has close to 12,000 subscribers while our live screen page is close behind with almost 9,000 subscribers. Moving on to update about the NHGRI Smithsonian Exhibition Genome Unlocking Lives Code. Let me remind you that for the next three years this exhibition is making stops as it tours across North America. The exhibition just left my hometown of St. Louis and is currently on its way to Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland where it will open on October 2nd. While the exhibition is in Portland NHGRI will sponsor programs for the public and secondary school students in partnership with the foundation for the NIH, the Native American Youth and Family Center, and the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. Please continue to check the exhibition's website unlockinglitescode.org and follow it on social media for the most up-to-date program information. Following its stay in Oregon the exhibition will begin 2016 in Milwaukee at Discovery World after which it travels to Salt Lake City and then on to Wichita, Kansas. And the exhibition accompanying website unlockinglitescode.org now publishes e-newsletters designed to help educators with tips, tools, and evaluation opportunities. The newsletter debuted in March of 2015 and is published monthly. It has experienced steady growth and popularity since its launch now having over 1200 subscribers. For those interested you could sign up by visiting the unlockinglitescode.org website. And as I mentioned the exhibition just left left St. Louis about a couple weeks ago and while the exhibition was still in St. Louis NHGRI and the Foundation for NIH partnered with the Academy of Science St. Louis to put on a public program entitled An Evening with the Experts DNA Personalized Medicine and U. The program featured experts from the St. Louis area discussing the promise of precision medicine as well as associated ethical and health disparities topics. I provided a keynote address at the event and moderated a panel discussion on the promise of precision medicine which featured Dr. Sesh Cole from Washington University, Dr. Stephen Kingsmore from the University of Missouri, Kansas City and Dr. Elaine Martis from Washington University. And then NHGRI's Dr. Laura Rodriguez moderated a second panel on ethics and health disparities issues which featured Washington University faculty members Dr. Sarah Gellert, Dr. Anya Plutinsky and Dr. Will Ross. In early August the Education and Community Involvement Branch held its annual summer workshop in genomics known locally as the short course. This year the program was focused on secondary teachers and faculty from nursing programs. So nine high school teachers from the DC metropolitan area participated in a three-day course that featured presentations and interactive sessions with NHGRI researchers. During these sessions participants had an opportunity to discuss novel ways to integrate genetics and genomics into their classrooms. And for the fifth year the Genomic Healthcare Branch hosted a parallel course that involved 15 nursing faculty who presented who participated in an intensive four-day overview of genomics. Course presentations were focused on the relevancy of advances in genomics to healthcare educators. Updates on the most current understanding of the genomics and genetic basis of disease and potential strategies for nursing education in genomics. And finally the partnership for community outreach and engagement in genomics coordinated by our education and community involvement branch held its second in-person meeting earlier this month in St. Louis. This partnership group is comprised of community liaisons and health advocates who are working together to engage their communities about genomics to inform and share perspectives about genomics research and to help refine the focus of research. This past year the partnership has been developing an infographic describing the basic elements of genomics that can be shared with their communities in healthcare facilities and classrooms on websites and through social media. And finally just a few things about the institute's intramural research program starting with former congressman Louis Stokes who sadly passed away in August and through his 30 year career as a representative from Ohio Stokes was a strong supporter of federal funding for biomedical research in general and for NIH in particular. He was a champion of extending the benefits of biomedical research to all people especially in the area of health disparities. Stokes was instrumental in launching NIH's office of minority programs in 1990 which became the office of research on minority health in 1993 which then rose to center status in 2000 and finally recently gained institute status in 2010. Now of relevance to the NIH intramural research program in June of 2001 NIH dedicated building 50 on the main NIH campus as Louis Stokes laboratories and I can tell you that NHGRI's intramural researchers occupy almost one entire floor of this building which is shown on the bottom right. Meanwhile, Dr. Praveet Gore a physician scientist in the laboratory of Dr. Dan Kastner an NHGRI scientific director has been awarded the 2015 American College of Rheumatology Distinguished Fellow Award. This award is given to clinical and research fellows who are nominated while in a rheumatology fellowship training program in recognition of their meritorious performance throughout their clinical and research training. And just a few highlights from our intramural program since the last council these would include Dr. Sean Burgess and colleagues who reported the gene editing technology known as CRISPR-Cas9 is six times more effective than other techniques and honing in on target genes and inserting or deleting specific sequences. Their study was published in genome research. A team led by Dr. Las Bieseker published a study that involves sequence in the genomes of presumed healthy participants and then determining the frequency of putative or presumed mutations that should almost certainly lead to a genetic condition. Their study was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. And then Dr. Chuck Banditti and colleagues published a study based on 10 years of observational studies with large patient groups with two inborn errors of metabolism. The team concluded that some medical foods quote unquote designed to help manage patients with rare inborn errors of metabolism may cause harm in some patients when their use is not carefully monitored and managed. And their study was published in the Journal of Genetics in Madison. And those are the main things I wanted to tell you before ending of course as always I want to put a plug in for anyone wishing to receive my monthly email update called the genomics landscape can go to this URL and register. And of course a personal thanks to lots of people who helped put this together. 50 to 60 staff members probably involved contributing slides and getting all these material including a lot of stuff that just broke over the last two weeks you can see a bunch of stuff last week. If it wasn't for this group of effort we'd never get this done. Thanks to the communications group and the web team and of course Chris Wetterstrand is the ringleader to make all this happen. And here's a picture shown with Chris and Elizabeth Thompson which was taken in 2009. And that's my direction but two last things I've put into place previously to entertain counsel a little. Anything humorous or relevant that's come up a day in my life I have two to tell you this time. A one which is a follow on to what I told you in February recall the story I told you about my double helix model which ended up through a frenetic set of activities requested by the White House so that it could appear in the president's announcement. The White House came good on a promise that was made to me that eventually I would be rewarded by the White House for the schlepping the getting the the double helix schlepped down and indeed it didn't get here until the summer but I did get an autographed copy of this photograph from the president so I thank the White House for coming good on that. The second story is one that is something that I think is humorous but happens to be all the time so as you know we have this history of genomics program now at the institute we have an institute historian and we're very organized now where when come across files or old boxes of materials they get sorted through and occasionally when somebody doesn't know what to do it gets brought to me what should we do look what we just unearthed and this and people move on or when we get offices that get cleaned up or boxes that get unearthed and so forth and every once while I think it's brought to me that just makes me chuckle and I wanted to share it with you when earlier this year this box of old photographs was brought actually it came from our intramural intramural office of all places and I just really enjoyed this because and I wanted to bring it to council because it allows you to say can you identify the council member in this old photograph and of course the thing about it is only one council member that actually used to be at NHGRI and that's this guy right here a very youthful Bob Nussbaum standing next to who must be Art Garfunkel right to your right has to be and I just thought this just this is what I this made me smile the day this was brought to me that we unearthed this photograph and Bob can you tell us this was where and when and do you remember who these folks are well sure so the guy on the far right is Lou Chase who was head of medicine for the Washi Service at the John Cochran VA hospital and next to him next to me on the other side is Elliot Abbey who was the other chief red so he and I were chief co-chief residents at the VA hospital John Cochran I'm afraid I don't remember the person on the far left he was less involved that was a great really a great experience that they allowed me to do as a senior resident that was just I think maybe a week or two after seeing a guy in an emergency room who had the worst anaphylactic reaction to eye and penicillin I'd ever seen and he just blew up and we actually rescued him and the guys in the ER were absolutely terrific and that ended up a really good residence report I bet so the other thing I accomplished by showing this slide is it now means that the staff sitting in the back are going to be much better about cleaning up their office when they move on and clear because they know that if they leave behind things I will embarrass them at some point in the future but in any case Bobby look great there I have to you know this look you you actually only look maybe five years older than in this picture okay what's that and so was David Crosby any good at sequence and with that I will end my director's report actually what are the comments Matt is that I just wanted to say something about Bill Gelbart so Bill introduced me to the NIH review process I sat on the committee for NIGMS that reviewed predoctoral and postdoctoral training grants and genetics I was a brand new assistant professor just came on and Bill was was really just instrumental in mentoring me on what it meant to to do site visits what it meant to do a review he was absolutely terrific at teaching and mentoring people so I just wanted to add that as an extra aspect I'm really sorry to hear his passing oh and it's not at all surprising to hear you tell that story because I can just I cannot stress enough we could probably spend hours here if you heard from various NHGRI staff especially those who have been closely working with the genome sequencing program for sort of just the wise council he's given us he's just for so many years was a person we'd always want to get on the phone and find out what does he think about this and he was just instrumental in advising us in many ways but in particular in the genome sequencing program so it is a huge loss of a really good friend and colleague yeah likewise I'd like to comment on the loss of Elizabeth Thompson she was of course a native Iowan she was always proud of Iowa I went to her funeral and she was definitely proud of NHGRI and the LC program and her contribution to that and all the people here I'm sure her husband Jim Hansen want me to express that Bill mentored me he was on our standing review committee when I first came to NHGRI and learned to be an SRO and he was terrific to work with in that setting and Val Elizabeth and I used to engage in a discussion all the time whether Iowa or Indiana was more representative of the Midwest those were probably to all of you boring conversations but we had fun with it any other questions about the director's report okay let's move on then


In the mind that falls asleep in dreams of a separate world, a virtual reality that's not real, it's dreaming of separation from God, it has a very deep hurt way down in the mind, very deep. But this belief in loss, we know as we've gone through this human experience, we felt loss. Maybe it was with a parent, maybe it was with a child, maybe it was with a lover or different lovers. Maybe you can go back to relationships where you had such high hopes for a particular relationship and then the relationship seemed to end, either the person left or they died or whatever. It's this belief in loss. And there's a part in A Course in Miracles where Jesus says in the text, you have many strange beliefs, but perhaps the strangest of them all is the belief that you can lose the ones that you love. That's a very telling line from Jesus, this belief that we can lose the ones that we love. Think of the great sages, think of Ramana Maharshi, remember Ramana Maharshi's final days when he got very thin, seemed to have a tumor and became like a skeleton. And the devotees were all gathered around him and some of them were just crying. Because why? Loss. How did the apostles feel when Jesus was taken away? When they watched what happened in Calgary, they watched the body of Jesus slump over there, bleeding. What do you think Mary Magdalene felt? What do you think Mother Mary felt? Sadness is always based in a belief in the mind. The emotions come from something much deeper. The belief that you could lose your connection with God is the most catastrophic feeling or belief. And that's why we have a subconscious. The pain of believing you could actually separate from God was so intense that it was pushed out of awareness, completely out of awareness, and covered over with his entire substitute belief system. And then this entire matrix world is all because of this belief in loss. You might experience betrayal. We think we get betrayed by persons, by people who promise us things and don't follow through. Say things, they don't mean them. We have this deep sense of betrayal, but it's a betrayal. If you trace it all the way back, it's with source, it's with God. The belief that we could be betrayed by God, the anger of separation, the pain of separation projected onto God. Why would you leave me here?  It's like, now you know why people are atheists. They would rather not believe in God than think that, oh, God abandoned me, abandonment issues, betrayal issues, loss issues. These are the things that Shakespeare wrote all his plays about, right? That's what Shakespeare was writing about. All these things, if you take them deep enough, it takes you back to this belief in separation from God. Some people call it the fall from grace. You can call it anything you want, a tiny, mad idea. I remember one time I was in Wisconsin and I was quoting the course. I said, into eternity we're all as one. There crept a tiny, mad idea at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. This man was there, ow, he was like, he went ballistic, crept. He started screaming at me, crept, crept. This was into eternity, we're all as one. There crept a tiny, mad idea. He was furious at the creeping. He was furious. The idea that there could be separation from source is huge. And Jesus is telling us, that's why we have a Course in Miracles, because you do believe that it's true. He's telling us it's not really true. He's saying, take my hand, I'll show you. I'll go down into the mind, let's go into that subconscious, and I'll light it up. If you'll let me have free access to your subconscious, I will light it up and show you that there is no darkness. The Bible said, perfect love casts out fear. And so if you'll come with me on this journey, I will show you that you are perfectly innocent. You never sinned. You never separated. Separation is absolutely impossible. That's what this journey is about, coming to the recognition that the separation never occurred. But it's also a practical one. You have to pay attention to those feelings, because those feelings tell you what you believe. And you do have to go in and make another choice, as she said. You do have to go in and see the world a different way. You do have to go in and unplug from the ego. And Jesus even says, I cannot take your fear away. I can help you look at the conditions by which you set fear up. And I can help you then make another decision. But I cannot take your fear away, because I would be tinkering with the basic law of cause and effect. If you needed me to take your fear away, then that would just prove that you aren't powerful, that you need some kind of a rescue. And we do need help for sure. But we don't need one of our equals, an equal brother, which is what Jesus is. Jesus wasn't God. He was the Son of God, and he knew who he was, so he has the wisdom to teach us how to unplug from the ego. But he's not going to come and take the fear away. You have to do it willingly. You have to do it voluntarily. You have to see what was done, and you can unmake what was made with careful instruction. And that's why it takes so much mind training, and that's why it takes discipline. But I'm telling you tonight that there's no other thing that you can put your value and attention to on Earth that would bring you as much as escape from the Matrix. Because that's what your heart is asking for. It wants to escape the Matrix. It wants to remember Heaven. All this other stuff is just a sideshow. It doesn't have any validity. It doesn't have any value. It doesn't have any purpose. Okay, there you go. That's the keys to the Kingdom.