- That you and yours are as well as can be expected during this ongoing difficult time. I'm going to kick us off here today and then introduce our session chair and then begin this morning's program. But before we do that, I wanted to remind you what the ExoPAG is. This is the Exoplanet Program Analysis Group. And we are a community based forum, meaning anyone who is interested in NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program Science is a member. And so anyone can join and participate. We try to be an interdisciplinary forum that coordinates community input and also provides analyses for NASA in particular, the Astrophysics Division. We report to the NASA Astrophysics Division director as many of you know and that is our main function. But it's really a two way street. We enable a lot of communication back and forth between NASA and the community. In addition to facilitating that, we hope that we can pass along findings and analyses that NASA will find useful in making decisions in how to execute its strategic plan. So again, we are all members of the community and everyone is welcome to participate in our endeavors. Let me just take a moment to acknowledge that the ExoPAG on a week to week or month to month basis is coordinated by an executive committee. And I'm very, very grateful for all of the names that you see listed here, all of these people who donate their time and energy to help us do a better job of coordinating the ExoPAG. And we try to have this body be as representative and diverse as possible, representing a range of different kinds of institutions, different backgrounds, different perspectives. And in particular I'll make a small note of Tiffany Kataria, Josh Pepper and Dmitry Savransky who will be rotating off in the coming year, not immediately, but we certainly thank them for their service. I will also point out that we now have observers and liaisons from all the different divisions of the SMD recognizing interdisciplinary nature of the ExoPAG's work and so this is really something we are pleased about and hope to continue into the future. I should also mention that nominations are... The call is out now for nominations for people to replace these pink names, the individuals you see here who will be rotating off. I will remain on as chair emeritus as long as the next chair needs some support in that way. But we really want to encourage everyone to nominate themselves or others to be a member of the EC. You can really have an impact on our community by proposing a mini symposia that we often feature in our meetings. You can initiate a new science analysis or science interest group. Science analysis groups are shorter term endeavors, and the interest groups are more long-term and ongoing. You can even help to lead the proposal of findings and discussion of them and voting on them which are passed to headquarters. We participate in reviewing the science gap list, you can put ideas forward for the technology gap list. Help us do a better job of increasing diversity, equity and inclusion in our field, inspire people. We hope and have an impact as I said on our community. We really want to encourage the broadest possible set of people to propose for this so please don't be shy to nominate yourself or a colleague that you think would do a good job. And just reach out to any one of us on this list if you're curious what the workload is or how exactly the participation goes. Well, here is our agenda. As you know we are dealing with rather difficult circumstances and let me just say thank you to all of the people behind the scenes who have been working tirelessly through illness and everything else to try to pull together this virtual meeting on less than an hour's notice. And so this is our program for today. We will have two breaks, one at 1:45 for 15 minutes and then another one at 3:10 for 15 minutes and we should adjourn close to 4:40 PM Eastern Time today. Tomorrow we have a special discussion about Astro 2020 with a couple of members of the executive committee with an exoplanet perspective, we'll have that conversation. And then we will pivot to the joint, the town hall, NASA virtual town hall meeting where Paul Hertz will give his address. And then we'll resume the main ExoPAG meeting on Wednesday as you've seen hopefully on the agenda. Let me just give a brief overview of a couple of the activities that the ExoPAG has undertaken. We every year provide the Exoplanet Exploration Office with input on the science gap list which tries to be maintained and be fresh and useful for NASA. One of us, Laura Schafer is supporting the upcoming meeting Exoplanets in Our Backyard II echoing the very successful meeting about a year and a half ago, and hopefully this meeting will happen in 2022, stay tuned for that. We report out to the Astrophysics Advisory Committee every time it meets three times a year usually, and the next one's coming up in March. And we also participated in a conversation of open source science initiative. Some of you will recall a request for information was put out in August and there's still an evolving ongoing response to that information in a new realignment of a longstanding policy with actions on the ground related to open source science that will be forthcoming in the next year or so. We present to the Planetary Science Advisory Committee as well in our role as a interdisciplinary Program Analysis Group. And we review reports from the SIGs and SAGs, a couple of them are closing out their reports and you'll hear more about that at our meeting this week. And finally we've enhanced the Astrophysics Division Cross PAG activities. So some of you will know there are three PAGs active within the APD, the PhysPAG and the COPAG. And we have been much more interactive and coordinating activities in the last year and a half or so. So one was obviously related to Astro 2020. We put out a statement sort of supporting the process more than a month ago. We have had a Cross PAG proposal for a new science analysis group on barriers to participation in the Astrophysics Space Science Program. And we're still finalizing that and hopefully that will be launched this winter. And finally, we talk about areas of mutual interests like technology gaps as well as this NASA data policy to which I alluded before. And finally, Tiffany Kataria will give you an update in a few minutes about the new class of ExoExplorers, the second year of this program of supporting young scientists, also giving them some professional development opportunities and creating networking opportunities for them as well. But Tiffany will tell you all about that in her presentation. One of the things I mentioned earlier is the opportunity for the ExoPAG to produce findings. And we've tried to regularize a process for that whereby at various meetings of the ExoPAG, people could propose findings or actually all throughout the year you'll see some URLs soon where you can go to a link and propose a potential finding. The ExoPAG EC then tries to reformulate or help to propose specific wording of findings to the whole ExoPAG, We try to have meetings where we talk about them and then potentially bring them to a vote for the whole ExoPAG to affirm or to reject any proposed finding. We have decided to go with a 2/3 majority, and we report the vote results as well as the finding text itself up to the director of the Astrophysics Division if the finding is adopted. And we can revisit these in the future, it's not that you vote on one finding once and you never hear it again, it could be reproposed later. But this we felt was a mechanism for us to have some specific finding or output or product that we could pass along to the leadership of the Astrophysics Division. And we tried to do this each year, at this meeting we have no findings to discuss but perhaps in future meetings we will. We are currently having four, two SIGs and two SAGs, the SIGs are the longer term. One is on Exoplanet Demographics and Jessie Christiansen will be reporting on that at this meeting. And another one is on Exoplanet and Solar System Synergies which has been very active and it's ongoing and I invite everyone who's interested in using the solar system as a touchstone for understanding exoplanet systems to please consider joining that. We've had two very energetic SAGs that are the shorter term activities come to conclusion. SAG 21 on Stellar Contamination on Transit Spectra will be making a final report at this meeting. And SAG 22, Exoplanet Host Properties reported out at the last meeting in June, and have now submitted their final report. And you'll hear about a proposal from John Debes about potentially a new SAG on Debris Disc Properties for Exoplanet Hosts. So, we have a business meeting on Wednesday. We will have a brief update from SAG 22 about their submission of their report. We'll talk a little bit about ExoPAG priorities and activities and people can share ideas for future activities. We'll of course review progress on previous actions. And a big topic perhaps will be to come to some resolution on where we should hold ExoPAG 26, two proposals have been made so far. One is to hold it in conjunction with Exoplanets IV. Potential dates could be April 30, May 1st. And that is in Las Vegas. And another opportunity is yeah, just a second buddy. Another opportunity is to hold the meeting in concert with the double AAS meeting in Pasadena, potential dates for that would be June 11 and 12. I have here a link, takes you to a Google form for voting. And others, we'll be putting that link in the chat I believe so that the poll should be open now and people can start voting on it and continue voting throughout the next 2/1/2 days, and we'll come back to converse on this at the ExoPAG business meeting. So here is a quick view of these links that you might want for the meeting website and agenda, FAQ, the Q&A tool which we'll be using to upvote different questions for the Q&A after the speakers suggestions form to input ideas for what we should do and proposed findings can be shown there. And with that, I will stop sharing.