Transcript for Associate Dean, Research and Graduate Studies Presentation - Graham Holloway

Speakers: CBS Dean Maz Fallah and Dr. Graham Holloway 

Maz Fallah 

The presentation by Graham Holloway for our Associate Dean Research and Graduate Studies position. Graham received his Bachelor's in Kinesiology from McMaster University. Followed up with a Master's in Kinesiology from Waterloo and then a PhD right here from HHNS at U of G. He joined us as an assistant professor in 2009 became an associate in 2013 and he has been continued to be very active on all fronts through those years and to today. Some of his service experiences that are relevant to the role as we're going forward is that he is currently the Grad program coordinator in HHNS and has been for some time. He has been the Chair of HHNS’s Animal Wing and understands animal research in the College.    

He's been on the BSC academic review committee understanding our academic needs and teaching. He's been on the T&P committee knowing what it takes to make T&P And importantly also us being on the research ethics board at the university and we all know that there's, that is a very important role for all the human based research. So, Graham himself is a very strong researcher in mitochondrial bioenergetics and he spans the gamut from working with molecular techniques through animal models to human exercise performance. He's published over 130 papers and has received funding from multiple funding agencies as well as industry partners. And what I'm just putting out here is that Graham has a wide range of experience that you would hope and expect for. Expect from an ADRGS both on the graduate student front as well as on all different aspects of the research front whether it is at a bench, whether it is in human participants research, whether it is working with animal models and moving those along, as well as what it takes to be funded by different agencies and how to interact with other companies and other agencies and partners. So, with all of that, I'm going to turn it over to Graham, who is going to talk to us today about his vision for evolving the College's research enterprise over the next five years. Take it away Graham. Oh, and I will say at the end we will do questions after his presentation and I'm happy to moderate the questions, if you want to put them in the chat or raise your hand and you can turn on your camera and ask the question directly. Now take it away. Graham. 

Graham Holloway 

Thank you very much for the introduction Maz. Greatly appreciate the invitation from the search committee to come and speak to everybody today. I know it's a busy time of year. So, I also am cognizant that everybody's time is quite valuable. So, I also appreciate everybody being here today. I know Maz just said that the questions can be held to the end, but I'd rather have a bit of a discussion. So, if people want to interrupt me, please feel free to unmute yourself. And interrupt. I will say that I'm more of a Zoom individual than a Team's person. So, I can see Maz right now and nobody else nor can I see the chat function. So, please interrupt me and I will happily address your questions as we move along if you'd prefer that. I think at the outset, I'd also want to acknowledge three people in particular that have been instrumental in kind of how I view central administration and maybe how we can support research excellence within the college. And they're they are. Okay, so in particular, Dr. Lawrence Spriet on the left, who was my mentor. I did my PhD with him and then he became our department Chair and he was really the first person that tried to instill in me a belief that central administration was really here to work for everybody else, to ensure that everybody else achieves their best. When I became the graduate or program coordinator or HHNS, Glen Van Der Kraak on the right there, was the ADR and he was really instrumental in trying to show me the value that a good ADR can have. And some of his models in terms of grad growth, funding as an example have really been instrumental in helping us grow our graduate programs. And hopefully, his knowledge is quite intimidating, which I always say and I will draw on his knowledge, I'm sure moving forward whether I'm in this role or not.  

In the middle there is Dr. David Wright. Dr. David Wright is a tier 2 Canada Research Chair in our department that is actually decided to leave us to go to UBC. And so in the last year, I've really been talking to him about retention strategies and maybe some of the things that other programs are doing that we could try to implement within CBS to try to help support research. So, a lot of what I'm talking about today is kind of stemming from the conversations that I've had those three individuals in particular. 

I'd also like to acknowledge at the start that the University of Guelph resides in the treaty lands and territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, and we recognize this gathering place where we work and learn is home to many past, present and future First Nations, Inuit and M√©tis people. Our acknowledgment of this land is our dedication of our collective responsibility to this place and his people's histories right and presence. Our College supports and adds our collective voice the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Committee on Indian residential school to never forget.  

While I was writing this land acknowledgement, the Pope also came out with a formal apology for role that the Catholic institution played in the residential schools in Canada. There was an outpouring of emotion online that I think is quite powerful if you go through and read some of the testimonials and the impact that the residential schools have had. And it really started to make me consider the benefits that I've had because of colonialization. I think it is important to acknowledge that we live and work on territory land. We are funded from the federal funds. Our research program is federal funds. My salary is federal funds and all of that has really been because of these treaties. From a personal perspective. I'm a first generation family from South Africa, which is also called "colonized institution", which has its own problems surrounding apartheid. And really when you think about the governments around the world with colonialization, it really became about of trying to suppress local histories and customs and assimilating of people to be more British and that really is against the thesis of diversity and inclusion that we are really trying to promote within the Canadian system, right now. So, I think it's important as we have these discussions around not only just the First Nations but a broader discussion around how we can support diversity and inclusion. And really, what I wanted to do when I was doing this was to think about maybe the role that the ADR can have in trying to contribute to reconciliation. And I was trying to think of a way that we could utilize science as a way to create connections within our local First Nations. And this is not an idea that I had, but just a memory that I had of a collaborator at McMaster who had property that bordered on two First Nations land and he actually started bringing graduate students onto the First Nations and using science as a way to test the drinking water and the soil around their land to get a better appreciation for the impact that we are having on the land. And so, he used science as a tool to try to create these connections between the local graduate students at McMaster and the First Nations people that were around his property. I think it's a great example of maybe one of the ways that we could try to promote these interactions to better learn from the First Nations and also to promote citizenship within our graduate students. I would encourage everyone to ask themselves, how they have benefited from colonialization, maybe what they can do to contribute to reconciliation and also have a broader conversation with yourself around promoting equity and diversity in our broader Guelph community.  

These points really kind of lead into one of the three things that I was charged with trying to talk about today, which was how would I address challenges graduate students face, including EDI, career readiness, and mental health. The other two contexts that I've been asked to speak about is my vision for evolving the college research enterprise and the next five years and some other challenges that are opportunities that I see for the college. These are a to me overlapping points. I think it's virtually impossible to not talk about challenges coming out of COVID that will impact maybe some of the strategic initiatives that we have in the next five years, and students are paramount to our research enterprise. 

And so, not discussing mentorship within students, to me is also a disservice to our strategic plans. So, I will try to handle them as kind of three separate issues but understand that when I go through my first vision for evolving the research enterprise, it really is going to talk about all three points at once. 

And then I'll loop back at the end to maybe discuss a few other points for the other two. So, when I started to think about the vision, I went to the University website, we really do have a vision of improving life and within CBS, it's improving life through science. And so, I tried to come up with maybe mission statements and core values that I would like to try to promote. I kind of came up with two mission statements that are in some ways very similar, so to provide the optimal resources and support for scientific inquiry and personal growth for all individuals. And for CBS to be recognized as Canadian leader in mentoring the next generation of biologists I think they're part and parcel with each other because we have to have the resources to also support the next generation of biologists. 

Some of the values that I think are important in our training is obviously integrity, creativity, respect, empathy, perseverance, and collaboration. I think creativity and perseverance will naturally be fostered within your normal research initiatives and interactions with your faculty member. I'm sure we can all appreciate that have creativity to be successful in our research and we definitely need to have perseverance especially with our current Covid experience situation or the inevitable reviewer #3 who asks for more experiments. I think integrity, respect and empathy can be something that we roll into maybe as a professional development course that would be interesting to discuss with the ADA office as well in terms of how we could foster that interaction between all three departments. And collaboration is a big one for me. I've always been surprised that at the undergraduate level, we have the Biological Science major that really utilizes and harnesses the expertise that we have in three independent departments. And at the grad student level, for the most part, we sent it to be silos. Now we do have some collaborative specializations like neuroscience, bioinformatics, and more recently, the One Health but a vast majority of our students really reside entirely within one home department. And don't take advantage of the expertise that we have in our neighbouring departments. I'd really like to try to foster some of those collaborations. 

When you think about where we are right now, and maybe where we're coming from out of the COVID pandemic, we really have isolated little units where we have students interacting with faculty members, and I think that we need to be cognizant of this because students are definitely feeling strange because they're isolated. And they're, they have a lot of different demands on their time and we also think, or should think about central administration is trying to find creative ways to support both faculty and student. And to do that, part of it is going to be about talking to faculty and students to figure out where their concerns are, so we can try to plan and create strategic initiatives to address that. We've been doing that at the student level for a couple of years because each home department has been giving out questionnaires. We've done that recently for our RCAP review. My understanding is that the ADA office has taken that to Central now and is trying to come up with one unified questionnaire that they can give to all three departments so we can start to compare data between the home departments, which will help us try to understand maybe commonalities that we can address.  

One of the concerns that we typically hear about from students is that money is a constraint. So we can all acknowledge that tuition costs have gone up, housing costs have gone up,but the student support has not been commensurate with that. Now if we talk to faculty members, we will equally complain about money our NSERC budgets haven't gone up proportionally with the cost of disposables. Some of our budgetary constraints have been exacerbated during COVID. We have students that have gone over term for valid reasons and we're still paying for them. And so, we haven't really got the same level of recruitment that we normally would see because of the budgetary constraints associated with COVID. As an example, within HHNS, we have shrunk from the 120 to 130 graduate students on a given year to about 100. And at any point in time throughout the COVID situation we have had over a quarter of our thesis students on leave of absences because of delays associated with human research or any number of reasons. This has made it difficult for faculty members to budget. And moving forward, I think we need to come up with creative ways of trying to create stopgaps in the short term to ensure that our grad growth continues. Now identifying money as an issue for students then isn't an easy fix because we can't just turn around and raise the minimum stipend because that would financially cripple a lot of faculty members, but it should help us understand the work life balance that students are facing because a lot of students are taking extra part-time jobs on the side, extra TAs. I have had students that are NSERC funded that are still taking jobs to make ends meet because their parents don't support them.  And so, we need to be cognizant of that when we are interacting with students. Faculty members are equally worried about their work/life balance. We're all probably cognizant of the extra time demands with teaching online and some of the efforts that we put into even writing grants from home while their kids are running around. It's very challenging. So, I think some of the strategic initiatives that we have to be careful because we can't just add workloads to faculty members. It's going to have to be a redistribution of our effort and time.  

Students are worried about competitiveness I think in particular in the last two years because they haven't had the same breadth of experience that they normally would have going to seminars, neighbouring institutions, or attending international meetings. Or even talking to their colleagues down the hall because we've been working under an isolated situation. Faculty members are also worried about competitiveness not just for themselves, but also for students. Without research productivity, it's difficult to get students funded on NSERC or CIHR. Which has a financial constraint on a faculty member if we take them, which also then gets back to recruitment strategies and the money associated with that which is difficult. 

Students for a number of years have been acknowledging that maybe 50% of our students are interested in pursuing a career outside of academics in which case they really wants to have professional training in their degrees to try to help foster that type of initiative and I think that part of what we've actually done, I will give credit to Crease. Crease who's done an excellent job with that. I'll try to highlight that because I think sometimes people don't know some of the resources that we have on campus. I also think some professional training for faculty members would be fantastic. I wish that I had had somebody talk to me when I first got hired about how to handle mental health. I still feel very inept talking and trying to support students, but we really don't have an infrastructure. Part of working on these committees with Brian Husband is that we've had the opportunity to interact with therapists that are part of student support services. And their perspective has been invaluable in helping me try to deal with my own students and how to support them. My wife happens to work in another institution and when she got hired three years ago, she had training from the local therapists to try to help her manage situations around mental distress. Where are the resources located on campus? How do you know what's my role was supporting a student? What do I say? If somebody is talking to them? Self-harm versus anxiety and depression versus any number of situations? And so, I think that having some of that professional training and a document for faculty members would definitely help. We can also think about these one-on-one kind of pillars or institutions from a department perspective. And this is really for the most part, I think, how students have been interacting and we really want to try to foster a way for natural collaborations to happen between students and between faculty members, between departments. I don't think that we can force that. I don't think I can look at somebody's CV and say, if you're doing cancer research in HHNS and cancer research in MCB, we're going to push you together and there's going to be a natural collaboration. I don't know if that's going to work. I think the better way to do this is to try to foster natural opportunities for people to learn from each other and maybe to get an appreciation for what each party is doing. So, a lot of my thoughts are around trying to bring students together and faculty together on campus so they could start to talk and communicate and hopefully those collaborations will naturally develop over time. 

So, I'm really going to try to highlight some training supports at the bottom and some financial supports at the top that I think central administration can help with. Some professional skill development is obviously important. And I think that Teresa did a great job in developing the grad pathways and if you go to the grad pathways, there are six skill domains that we have access to and you can get certificates for them. So, it could be the communication, it could be teaching, it could be about leadership. And I feel like faculty and students do not know about this quite as well as they should and they're not utilizing it for its full advantage. I would love to be able to scaffold on top of that some CBS specific training and work with the ADA office to try to come up with communications whether it's working with Sarah Bates in the SCRIBE program or feedback in terms of presentations or leadership capabilities, and bringing students together from three different departments into these modules to try to get them communicating and interacting one on one or in small little groups. I know when we did this at Waterloo, there were maybe 10 modules that you could choose from and students were taking four of them and so you have a bit of selection but it would help us I think bring people together and help foster some of those professional skill developments. Within that I think we can also layer in discussions and ongoing open dialogue around promoting EDI, mental health, any number of professional development skills that I think people need in any profession that they move into. And so, I think that that's a great opportunity to continue to create those dialogues. Internally, if we look our graduate students are not taking the online EDI training. So, at any moment in time HHNS students have only gone up to about 50%. And as they graduate over time, it's slowly going back down because the new students coming in aren't taking the EDI training. And so, I think we need to do something more to have a more prominent discussion about it and that might be a great forum to do it. 

The other thing that we can try to do to bring people together is to repurpose some of our seminars. I actually think this is an initiative that Todd Gillis tried to do right before COVID hit. And we were talking about coming up with a way with having a seminar competition between our three different departments and maybe trying to layer that in on the back end of the Graduate Student Symposium day and turning it into an awards event. So, each home department has an award that they give out for the best student seminar every year and it would be bringing those three people together in an awards competition, but to try to get people to also attend seminars in somebody else's home department. We were discussing trying to come up with a weighted average that actually had to do with how prominently our students at HHNS as an example, attended a seminar in MCB. And so, we could take attendance and come up with a weighted average to encourage students to attend seminars throughout the year. And then when people voted in real time for that winner in that seminar competition, it would be also factored in terms of how higher participation has been throughout the year. I think within that competition, we can also celebrate success. So, I think that talking to students about their GTS awards, their OGS awards, their NSERC, their CIHR Awards, the MCB, IB and HHNS Best Paper awards. All of that should be prominently displayed for people and it will also highlight the breadth of research that we're having on campus and maybe pique somebody's interest in terms of trying to initiate a novel collaboration. 

When we look at trying to come up with novel ways of training students and going to that next generation, we also want to think about equipment. And we've been particularly good with CFI for the JELFs in recent years but not as prominently successful in the College funds for some of these other programs that are multimillion dollar awards. And I think that we need to do a better job of trying to utilize the fact that we have 100 different biologists under one umbrella of CBS and trying to look for natural ways, again, to promote that collaboration to make these programs a little bit stronger. And if we're strategic about it, and we can get this infrastructure and it will really help students and faculty in all three departments. As an example, I'll use Emma Allen Vercoe just because I collaborate with her as a great example. If she wrote a CFI for sequencing technology that would be a multimillion dollar award. Maybe that would help people in IB and HHNS and bringing those people together would really be beneficial. I also think where central administration can help is that type of an initiative would benefit everybody in the college. And so, when we look on the left and we see time balance as a concern, I'm always cognizant of saying to my collaborator, "Hey, will you go write this massive CFI that's gonna benefit everybody. And it's just added time for you". And so, I think that maybe we should consider buying the faculty member out strategically from maybe a teaching load, which would also provide mentorship for their own senior graduate students to teach their course to get that feedback. To advance their own professional development. At the same time, the faculty member has the time to really focus in on some of these strategic initiatives that would benefit everybody. I know Dr. Spriet many years ago, actually when he became our Chair pitched, a multimillion dollar CFI that he wanted to create for HHNS, but it would benefit everybody within CBS because it was about an exercise outreach program for the local community and it was a bit of free exercise for the local community which creates research opportunities for people and as we move towards different funding, and we have the experiential learning aspect of things that actually provides a great platform for undergrad students to be in that research setting and in that clinical exercise in as well. And coming up with strategic ways then to maybe choose one person per year to really go after those big picture ideas might be beneficial. When we consider financial supports again. Glen Van Der Kraak's Grad Growth Fund has been going on for a number of years and I think it was quite productive in terms of trying to support financially grad growth. Scholarships that we've had in recent years that have been internal, like the GTS awards have been fantastic. But I think that we also need to take a look at maybe how we could adjust some of those scholarship programs to maybe optimize growth in the short term. I'd love to have a discussion with Ben Bradshaw about repurposing some of our GTS awards. As an example, currently if you have a GTS and you give it to a PhD student, it's for four years, but many faculty are concerned with the bridge right now between the Master's in the senior aspect of a PhD because people haven't been as productive during the last two years of COVID. And so, maybe repurposing the 4 year award into to two 2-year awards doubles the number of students that we can fund. Similarly, if you take a two year master's award and double it, for two students, it's one year per student, but that might make it a little bit easier for students to find positions in labs and for faculty members to take a gamble on maybe somebody that they weren't quite certain of it, and that might help our grad growth. 

The other thing that I think we should consider is novel ways to maybe implement scholarships and I never like talking about removing new supports, but I've talked to a lot of people within HHNS, and one of the things that they've said is that they don't apply for the small equipment grant that just came out. And part of the reason for that was because they have access to that through an NSERC RTI and we have quite a high success rate within the NSERC RTI. And the feedback that I got from them is that if they have a new student, and they get $13,000 as a grad growth from that PhD student that $13,000 goes into a general purpose account, and they can use that to buy the equipment that they needed anyway. And so strategically, looking at how to support faculty and growth in the short term might mean that we want to repurpose some of that money. And the other thing that I'd love to have a discussion with people about is using that money, maybe in a more of an equitable way. And I'm always surprised that at the graduate level, we never consider social economic status. So at the undergrad level, we have USRAs, and we have you URAs. But at the graduate level, we don't consider the fact that some of these people who are not in as privileged position who don't have parents financially supporting them are working a lot of hours. I went to school with somebody who did a PhD, who had to work 30 hours a week on the side because both of his parents were not very healthy, and he was actually fronting the money to keep their house and so he never got any awards because he had an inordinate amount of time and effort put into keeping his parents in their house. And now he's a faculty member and is doing exceptional work and he never had the same opportunities that other people did. And so, maybe talking about repurposing those scholarships in a little bit more of a fair way might help as well. 

CRCS are a big one. Moving forward, I know that there are 10 that are upcoming. Four of which are also earmarked for equity seeking individuals and I think it'd be fantastic to have a discussion around how we can strategically utilize those not just for growth. This is one of the things that Dr. Wright was always talking about is that we also have to have a retention strategy. So, we have a lot of young faculty members that have been hired in recent years. They're doing exceptional work. And I don't want CBS to become a farm system for other institutions where our top talent gets pilfered and goes somewhere else. So, having a discussion about how we can also try to retain talent is really important for us. I list CIHR up there, but it could really be any major grant. One of the things that I'm always cognizant about is we spend a lot of time and we get these major grants, and that just adds work. So, we still teach the same amount, but we take on extra research, we take on extra students. And so, that work life balance really becomes difficult. And so, I think anytime we have a major grant, I would love to go to Dean's Council and talk about again strategies for shifting our distribution of effort. We have the ability to shift towards service. We have the ability to shift towards a higher teaching load but it seems to be much harder to shift towards a higher research load. And if we have these big grants that take extra time and mentorship for the extra students that are in the lab, I think it'd be fantastic if we could come up with a way to adjust our distribution of efforts to really support that research enterprise. And I'll list NSERC Create out there even though it's really a training platform as well. I think creating these natural collaborations abroad. I use that since I'm in the Netherlands right now supporting my [unclear] student and my postdoc that it's been two years working here. I think creating these opportunities are great and I think that Integrative Biology is in a great position actually out of everybody to really go after some of the cutting or modern issues that people are facing with environmental issues in ecology and global warming and create these collaborations with UBC, as an example. And then maybe tried to send some students around the world would be fantastic and I think that we'd have to try to treat those the same as the large CFIs because it is really difficult to get I think we would have to come up with a strategic way of trying to adjust our time demand to afford the flexibility for faculty to go after those. 

So, I've really focused in on some of the things that I think that we can do from a central administrative role in the next five years. Now, although I've really talked about it in the context of professional skill development courses and some of the seminars highlight a couple of other things that I think are important for EDI career readiness and mental health. And I'll start by saying I really do think that we need to improve the accessibility for mental health resources. When I started as the graduate coordinator, I was always surprised that we don't have a document that goes out to all of our incoming students that provides all of the resources nor do we have a document for incoming faculty members with all of the resources and we really want to try to make this as accessible as possible. Proof of principle, I went to our CBS website and there was no information and then I went to the Associate Dean website. And way down, about fourth on that list undergraduate studies was student wellness and experience and if you click on it, you can get to some other you know, links that say if you're confused, maybe reach out to these people. And it's really not accessible. Every click is a barrier to somebody that's experiencing something. And so, we really want to try to come up with a way to make this a little bit more manageable for everybody. I also think again, coming up with those resources for faculty members would be important talking to the experts and getting their input in terms of how we can best support people, I think is invaluable. To improve the EDI. I also think village visibility is important. Not only do we tend to be silos when it comes to our research, we've also done that on our home webpage. So, there's actually nothing on the CBS website for EDI, there's visibility. You have to go to the home departments for an HHNS, MCB, and IB before you see the logos for it. So, I think part of that is also improving the visibility on our CBS website. We can talk about that within that professional development course when we layer that into the grad pathways. And again, repurposing some of those scholarships might be an important discussion to have to improve career readiness. To improve career readiness, again, part of that is education around the existing supports for that grad pathways. And then even with we're doing seminars, I think it'd be invaluable for students to give feedback to other students. So, learn how to effectively communicate, how to also take constructive feedback to improve. So, I always find that our students go to these international meetings, and they give you know, presentations and then they never get feedback. So, they never know if they've done a great job or you know, where they can improve and so I think that giving feedback to them would be hugely important.  

When we start to think about other challenges and opportunities that I see. For the college, there's a couple ones that I think are important. We have a number of people that are going to retire or have retired. So in our department Dr. Spriet retired. We've also got David Wright leaving and recent years we've also had a couple of other people that have left. And if you look at the strategic plan for Integrative Biology, they identified five people that were going to retire within the next two years and MCB has a number as well. So, we're going to have a number of retired individuals that are coming up, which opens up space for some new strategic hires. And so, it's a great time to have a discussion around our strategic plan and how we can target specific areas, whether it's for the upcoming CRCS or for the replacements of these individuals. And also puts added pressure on trying to train these new individuals. And so, that's why it's also a great opportunity to have discussions around new training programs, resources for mental health, because the new people coming in don't have any memory and I always find it's easier to change if you don't have the memory then to work within a system sometimes. 

COVID is obviously going to be an ongoing problem. We were hoping that the mask mandate would be released on May 1, and obviously that hasn't happened. And I think people need to be aware that there's going to be a host of emotions. I'll tell you being here I have a host of emotions because nobody wears masks in the Netherlands. So, it's very difficult to walk around when people are coughing, left, right and center. So, I think that that level of anxiety is going to be there is not going to allow the international travel for a lot of different reasons. And so we really need to come up with a way to be strategic in house to try to support our students and our growth. 

Budgets are an obvious issue that could probably be listed anytime that a senior administrative is applying for a position because I'm sure budgets are always up there as a concern. I don't think that that's ever going to change. But we do need to be cognizant then of how we try to target some of our strategic plans because we can't just lay our money on top of money because we just don't have it. 

But when we start thinking about how to handle retired individuals and new hires and COVID I do think it does provide some new opportunities. As an example, we have ongoing health concerns related to COVID. We have ongoing food insecurities. We have ongoing environmental concerns. And if we're strategic about our hires, and some of our initiatives, I think that we can strategically place our graduates for success. If we're strategic with getting that infrastructure, then we also provide new training platforms whether it's through the CFI or the NSERC Creates or some of these other internal opportunities with seminars. That might foster new internal collaborations. And ideally, we should also be thinking about new career opportunities. I know human health a little bit better than some of the other programs, but I'm hearing a lot of people discussing around back to work strategies and how we can promote that when people are working from home.  

And so, there's a lot of initiatives right now within occupational health in terms of promoting health and healthy living at home and how can we advocate for that? And so, there's going to be new opportunities for people that are graduating with their undergraduate degrees or master's degrees that are going on to different professional skills. And if we're strategic about it, we can plan to make sure that they're successful.  

So, I think at the outset, I really wanted to try to highlight to everybody that my goal is to try to provide optimal resources and support for everybody within CBS. And really, it breaks down to trying to find creative ways to support both faculty success as well as students in the interaction between those two and across departments. 

And with that, everybody's been quiet. So, I guess now the floor is open to questions.