Thank you, Madam Chair. And good morning to all our trustees and also the staff members who have joined us, and also the members of the public. We made this retreat a public occurrence for you. So I'm glad that you're here and I'm sure there'll be more people the afternoon when we talk about AI. I don't want this to be overly formal, so this is really to benefit you and so we can engage even more. And so as I go through some of the slides that we put together with my team, I will encourage you to ask any questions you have, interrupt, and for that matter I may have the answers. And if I don't have the detailed answers, I will point to the members of the staff who are here so that they can elaborate more. So we'll get started with the good news. So we always feel that our university is an excellent place, but it's really gratifying when you see others realize that as well. So the US News rankings, which are important to many, including the parents and prospective students in particular, have come out this year. And according to the US News 2024 surveys and things, we have risen 13 spots. So now we're at 76. Certainly this has been our highest rank in a very long time and I think certainly the highest in my time. I would say that it's all the beginning because we do feel that there is a considerable more of movement based on where we are positioned. And appreciate, I hope this as we go on. Also among public, we're now ranked 36. That's two spots up from last year. And I have to tell you that there's a whole lot of tying among the, the institutions that are ranked. Like, for example, the public. There are four with us. And so just a hair difference, you could move us to 32 or down, right? And so we need to be vigilant about what we do. Intentional because others are not complacent either. You know, our university score, I mean, overall news give you a score out of 100. And when I started our score was 48. Now our score is trying to remember, I don't want to get it wrong. I think 68. I think if we were able to move it up to 73, just give you a sense in the absolute scale would be ranked 58. So I mean, just like small differences in a number of parameters that make a difference. Before I get into those parameters, I want to mention that we have a number of programs that we're extremely proud of. In particular, within the engineering. Because these are the ranks for undergraduate programs within engineering, Chemical engineering is rank number five. The ranks for programs are reputational, purely reputational. The ranks for colleges and particular universities are not, you know, they involve many other factors which are quantitative. Reputation may be 20% of it, but for programs it's all reputational. So it's the peers, the department chairs of chemical engineering and Deans that get surveys and the rank programs. So our chemical program for years now has been the top ten. And those of you who say, well, last year we were two and now we're five. I mean, this is very noisy, right? I mean, as long as within those survey world you get the right kind of responses, you will continue to be, if you are a good program. Top ten, so five is great. Ranking engineering as a whole has moved up four spots. We're now top 40. Again, I think there is room for movement there based on the hires we've made. Psychology is doing well. Computer science business is doing fine. I mean, I think we're hopeful that it can move much higher than the top 75 into the top 50 in the next few years. Again, based on the investments we've been making in hiring a new Dean, economics as well. Within those programs, generally speaking, nursing has always been a good program, top 75. It's still rank high, but the last couple of years it's the only program among the list that has experienced a slide. And we are, as I said before, reputation based. We're trying to figure out whether some of those factors that are affecting nursing at the moment. Because important program for our state, very important program. We are also listed among the best valued schools, the best colleges for veterans, and the best undergraduate teaching. Before I go on, I think this is a Kolar celebration this moment. Let's give everybody a hand and thank. Thank everybody, particularly staff and deans, the leadership team for working with Us Provost, myself, others to make this happen. Let's see now why it happened. In particular, primary reason is because US news after decades of having a methodology where they incrementally tweaked a little bit year after year, they have now changed the wholesale the methodology. To give you a sense, they're now tracking ten broad categories and with the subcategories in those, it's 19 overall indicators. Things varying from the graduation rate of your students to their compensation after they're out in the field. So all kinds of things. Last year there were fear factors and indicators. So from 16 indicators, the subcategories, that went to 19. But I think what's more important is not the number but it's out of those 19 data were not collected for eight of those last year, eight of the 19 are brand new. Okay. So they really dropped things and they added things. So what have they dropped? They removed a lot of those things that I would call are in the category of academic elitism, which favored heavily in the past private schools. I'm not going to give you examples, but all of you know, some of them typically liberal arts colleges, typically expensive in terms of tuition. Small intake of students, a lot, rejection of applicants and all kinds of things like that. Small class sizes, they dropped those types of factors that really favored this set of schools. For example, small class size, good experience in those schools, create a lot of loyalty among alumni. The giving grade, where the double digits, sometimes over 20% alumni giving now is gone as a factor. The class size, particularly class size is under 20, which is an area where we didn't do particularly well, dropped the high school standing when you entered the university dropped, many of those students were coming from high schools with very small classes. So it became almost like silly to track that what you're standing if you have ten students in your class. But this is gone. The proportion of instructional faculty with terminal degrees is gone. That was essentially reported by the Institutional Research Departments of different universities. And some took a very liberal approach, and some took a more conservative approach as to what constitutes the terminal degree for teaching in certain disciplines in the arts. Is this like a bachelor's degree or is a doctoral degree? I mean, different institutions have different views. Music You can replace the subject with any you want. Some were like 99% of our faculty have the right degree for what we're teaching, and others like us may have been reporting more like 93% I don't know where Rich is, you know from R, I think he's here. Yeah. Generally speaking, one of the things I will say is that if anything were conservative, right? We're not aggressive in reporting. Is that a fair statement? And I appreciate that. You know, and so this is where we were. Factors added though. Big one, that changed, changed really the DNA of the rankings from being mostly undergraduate teaching and so on. Undergraduate experience, they added research for the first time with a small percent overall. In the weight out of Und points only four 4% things like citations of papers that your faculty produce and things like that. Citations per faculty member, research grants. Although the weight is small, if past experience is a predictor of the future, anything that US news strikes with a small weight over time, it increases in weight. That's how social mobility came in, at 4% a few years back, and now it's like 20% I think, of the weight or a big number anyway. Is that about right? Reach is about 20% Now I think there'll be a day in the next, maybe five years, ten years, that research would be 20% of the whole thing. And I think that will only help us move up. An interesting new parameter is you'd have thought this is a no brainer. I had a long conversation with Len last night about it. College graduates earning more than a high school graduate, you'd have thought that Absolutely they do. Well, I think there's like 30% of the universities, you know, where that actually is not true. Ten years into the field, if you just went to high school, you know, and got a job, you may make more than having studied at those places. So justifiably, they're penalizing you for those kinds of outcomes. And social mobility is a very important one, We know that in US News eyes. And of course, what they track primarily is the number of Pell students and the graduation rates of those Pell students in the past. And now they divided the first Gen students and the graduation rates of the first Gen students. I'm not entirely certain how they sort of like document rigidly the first Gen students, but you know, that's again something that they're going to fine tune as time goes on because a new thing. So some of the As changes helped us out. In particular I have to say though, I'm not very proud of our rank there. Last year in the social mobility were like 435 out of 460 institutions, and now we've jumped 100 spots to whooping, you know, 335. Well, that's good, but you know, it's not really good. You know, we would like to see that move maybe in the 200. And, you know, if we move in the 200, that's when we move in the top 50, you know? So those are some of the things that we have to do if we care about the rankings. But with that said, let me show you also there are some things that some parameters out of those 19 that are the same as in the past, they've retained them. And there are parameters in particular where we're actually doing quite well. Very, very well. I would say the test scores is a category where people now report if they want for most places, and they don't, if they don't want to. So in a way that introduced some bias because if, you know you didn't get a good score, you're not going to report it, right? You're not going to be dumb. But what we've seen out of those reporting SAT scores, which is relatively same percent the year before for us, we've gone up both at the minimum level and the highest level. So our range now is 11 90 to 13 60. So it's continue to get harder to get into the university. The first year retention rate, we're doing well, 91% Personally, I think we should be closer to 93% and we can get there. I'll talk about it in a minute and that'll help us even more. Our six year graduation rate is 83% strong. We just slipped a little bit from last year. We're at 84% Our goal is to improve that. I think we can get to a six year graduation rate in the high '80s and that'll happen. Faculty salaries. I'm actually particularly pleased with how we are faring. In terms of the faculty compensation, we have very competitive compensation. We've improved 30 spots from last year, from 79, we now ranked 49. I want to also add that we have very competitive benefits on top of our compensation. You know, with the up to 11% match to retirement when people contribute the maximum 5% very good health care benefits. And I know it's a conversation statewide right now about retiree benefits. You heard a comment during the public comment. I think there'll be an announcement coming up from the Governor's office very soon that will address this. But overall, the contributions that our faculty and staff make towards retirement is lower than our peers. And so these are the good news, and we're proud of those rankings. Will nine to work hard to improve more? I'm going to pause here and see if anybody has any questions because I know this topic is hot. I had conversations with Nisha about Vanderbilt slide five spots. Yeah. So my takeaway as we were looking at rankings several years ago, you know, one of the challenges was some of the rankings didn't make sense in terms of what we want to track. But they were the rankings. So I think it's a positive move to see that they're going more towards outcomes that matter. And to me, it feels much more aligned with what really is embedded in our strategic pillars and our priorities. So I think that's the good news. Yeah, thank you. More alignment with outcomes and what we're trying to accomplish a day. Said. And to be honest, I mean, when you compare our institution and we've been always doing that quietly. Again, some of the most recognized institutions in the country, the U, you know, when it comes to the undergraduate dimensions, the ones that US news track for many of them were like the median, you know, of the AU set, you know? So that's very, very good for us. In fact, we're considerably better in the US News ranking than a number of the EU's today, the composite rankings. Dennis research is the new thing. Yeah. Good. I was going to say about the SAT scores, isn't that a measurement that's really kind of beginning to pull back across universities today? Yeah, many are thinking that. And I'll have a Rodney, who I'm sure is here somewhere. Right, Rodney? He'll be here shortly. Shortly. Okay. I haven't seen him yet, but you know, he's more plugged to the national conversation, so we can address that more later. But yes, many have now gone, particularly since the pandemic to SAT optional. And they're not reporting. And it's a small percent that is reporting. Now, I don't know the exact number. Rodney would know that number or perhaps I know that number. You know what percent of our people report. Does anybody have that number? If not, we can table it. Yes. Rich 25. My guess was 2025. Okay. So, you know, it's not a lot. The question is, is it still a good predictor? And will it go away completely? And what will US news do many questions. Some of our faculty are complaining that we don't have the SAT scores anymore. And that the students that come in, although they come in with very high GPA from their high schools, like our class this year is the highest in the five years. In terms of GPA, John very high, but you don't really track the math ability within that. I have to tell you that right now we're at the all time high, maybe in the last five years of students who don't qualify, when we bring them in, we ask them to take a math qualification exam to see what level of calculus. We place them a significant number. I'd like to say 700 this year. We're basically placed in calculus for no credit. Math 070, it doesn't even start with 100 so they can catch up with their high school work. And sadly, a large proportion of those are delawarians. I'm mixed heart drop, SAT, vers, not drop. At least we had an indicator. The reality is that the students are not coming as well prepared in math post pandemic as we would have liked to see. Is the other reaction to the rankings. The peer review is a key piece, and I think that's another area you guys have focused on. We're not good at toting our own horn with other institutions, but that's an important part, right, in the respective colleges, in terms of how we're viewed. And are we doing everything possible to kind of tell our story? I know Glenn has done a lot of work there. Yeah, Glenn, can you comment on that? Are we telling our story? Yeah. Yeah. Use it Mike, please. I mean, my perception is we've done much more to kind of give talking points. So when you're with your fellow peers conferences and so forth, those things matter. I think the ranking Mary, what is the ranking part of the peer? It's pretty significant. 20% of the ranking is how we're viewed by our peers. Yes, can you hear me? So last year, that metric did improve for us. And we're constantly exploring ways because as you know, we have multiple stakeholders, primarily focused on admissions and enrollment. But certainly the peer recognition is important as well. A key vehicle for that, as Dennis has spoken about before, is the President's report, which is something we've distributed both digitally as well as print. We had a brief recess on print during Covid, but we're back in business there. Getting into President's inboxes. We've also increased strategies and attention to sponsorship in partnership with trade publications that are read by the education audience of influencers that participate in these rankings primarily chronicle of higher education where we've been promoting either in some instances the President's report itself, Others specific articles that are focused on metrics, relevant content like graduate retention, diversity, equity, and inclusion. All those pieces we're getting out as well. Then Dennis and I just had some conversations early in September about some other things we may be doing to even promote more visibility for him as a president in terms of the voice of the institution. At publicly present conferences as well as op eds and some other things we'll be doing in the media. Thanks. Yeah, and to that point, you know, anything we can still do at all levels. And I want to emphasize all levels because for example, the institutional I worked prior to my last institution where I worked has similar colors with ours. If that gives you a hint, the department chairs played a very important role because when it comes down to the discipline rankings specifics like how good is your mechanical engineering? I mean really, how strong is your ability to influence the other mechanical and drink chairs that rank you? I can distinctly tell you that, you know, in my time, you know my place, my department was ranked typically top five. And, you know, the rank is kind of code given, it's like it and then it's Berkeley and Stamford, Caltech, and there was my institution and, you know, we got in one year at number two. And that was because, you know, we were able to convince the other people, the other chairs that we're doing, some cooler things than they're even doing in their departments because you go and you present your peers and conferences and things. We're not doing enough of that. I find here our department chairs sometimes very coy about leaving the place and going out and traveling nationally. Speaking about innovations, how are we bringing AI in, the teaching of health science or this or that? The other people say wow, they're doing really cool things. Our simulation now, conquering the world of nursing and doing that. I mean, I think we do better things than we actually sometimes tell people about what we're doing in our labs. I talked with Oliver yesterday during the Fintech ribbon caring. I mean Oliver. Yaw Dean who came from Lehigh. Oliver, does Lehigh have nice places like this? I was saying that Lehigh have nice teaching labs and set ups like what you've seen in Fintech yesterday, I'm sorry, does not have a Fintech set up like we do. I think we're pretty unique in the position to develop this field for many years to come. Yeah. And yet they ran closer to top 50 in the graduate business. Ran 75. So I think we need to correct some of those perceptions. That takes some effort, but I think we have enough substance. And anyway, that's import and leverage, whatever we can, whatever we can, in any way we can. Because it's all about depressions on peers. You get a taste this afternoon from Picst with two of my colleagues in the panel on AI. I don't want to brag about myself truly, but I'm the only sitting president from any American University that's on that committee. I don't know that anybody even knows that. I don't think that that specific topic needs to be broadcasted like that. But I do have a voice and I get plugged into a number of things that are going to happen, you know, in terms of policies and changes that will affect the R and D and the impact. And I think we should leverage it even internally ahead of others so we can talk more this afternoon. I'll move on to the next topic. Unless anybody else is passionate about the rankings. I do say though that some other rankings like the Wall Street Journal that came on this year, I think we're, I don't remember the number. It certainly within the top 100 and, you know, last year we were like 130. So there is movement, I think might have been 86, where regular it must be somewhere. And Rich, you know, you'll tell me what the number is. But the point is, you know, there's a number of different indicators where we're saying we're doing really well right now. So I'm going to move to the next topic, which is when you're doing well, people realize that they're not dumb. In terms of applications, we continue to experience phenomenal growth year after year after year, when people read like, what's going to happen with enrollments and this and that, and institutions truly struggling and even shutting down or merging campuses. We tend to get now, lately, significant boost in applications. This last year we experienced another 6% growth in applications. Now we're over 37 500, I think. Or 37 62, to be precise. My prediction, again, knowing that like in 2016 we're like under 25,000 My prediction is we'll soon be getting 50,000 applications. How soon? Probably within the next five years. But that's a lot because we don't have any aspirations right now to grow our freshman first time full time class to more than the number that you see to the right. So basically, if you observe the last six years, every single year except one actually except two, we're 4150-4250 Our design point right now is around 4,200 And those things you cannot just digitally entering a machine. You know, although I do think that very soon we'll be using AI to read the applications materials. There's just no doubt in my mind at least to do a pre read because there's just no way to read, you know, 50,000 essays one day, you know, and others are probably already doing that. So when you look at the 4,200 number, it's a comfortable, you know, ceiling for us at the present moment, uh, for the entering class, given the number of faculty, we have an excellent student faculty ratio, it's 12 to one. Excellent. I forgot to mention that among our indicators in the US. News on it's private school like it's fantastic. Most of the big public, big ten in the 17 range 17 to 112 to one is unbelievable. So that's a good sign. The housing that we have today, quality of the housing, the student centers, numbers, capacity. I think it feels comfortable to us. I'm sure Jose will say 42 Hive. So much better than 4,600 With that said, you can clearly see that the pandemic fall, we slipped from the 4,200 design point, give or take, 3,700 Us and everybody else in the world. Then I'd say we almost strategically infield, with one year of a bubble, we went to 4,600 Plus I think that's necessary because in so many ways, when you have an under enrolled class, you suffer financially from that low enrollment for 45 or six years until this bubble goes through. This will be borne out by my next chart which shows like, you know, there's so much emphasis, sometimes people get hung on like what's the size of your entering class? And, you know, I think what we should be thinking is what's our total undergraduate enrollment on campus? So you can see we've been pretty constant, around 18,000 Again, give or take, We're a little lower when I started 17669, and we've had a few runs over 18,000 Not by much, A little bit. And generally speaking, again, excluding the pandemic year 2020, where we dropped about 300, we're very close to 18,000 and we're doing a lot of things to stay there. So it's not just the first time full time, we need to be thinking about transfer populations that are coming in, including those from our associated in arts programs. There's a lot of other parameters that we have to be considering because schools always lose some percent of the freshman class and then some of the sophomore class. Like typically a retention rate from freshman to sophomore is 91% and then you lose some more pipelines, leaky from sophomore to Junior. Some never cross the finish line for a variety of reasons. We can talk more about that. Retention is a very active objective right now for us because that really is leading to the finish line. The other thing I want to point out, we pay a lot. Is there a question or no? We pay a lot of attention on the distribution of the students in state, out of state. First thing, out of those 37,000 applications, the percent of those that come from Delaware is about 10% 90% are out of state applications. We're truly a national university, that's another indicator. We're also university within a small state, so we have to work extra hard to get to a fraction of the class. That's about 39, 38% Delawareans as extra hard because we're working with only a 10% sample, you know, in those 37,000 applications. And then we yield about 38% Delawarians. The good news is when we offer admission to Delawarean, we have a 50% chance that they will actually come here for a variety of reasons. You know, closer to home and of course, very financially possible for them. Our Delaware and average get about a 50% break on the tuition bill. And for families, as you know, under $75,000 we paid the entire thing. And for many of them, we give them not just tuition, but fees, as well as some housing allowances and so on. So that's a lot, right? We can't really extend that generosity to our out of state students and for that matter, international students are discounted almost zero. So those are some of the parameters. But I do want to show you the fact that this last year, in particular, our number, oops, hard navigate right there. Our number of in state delawarians is part of the total body. 6010 is the lowest in the last six years. And so although it's not like an alarm, right, it's not markedly lower. It is challenge for us. I mean, if you look into crystal balls and I do a lot of that myself, you know, you've got to be concerned about what's happening with the ability of our high school graduates to perform well in mathematics. And how competitive they are entering a university. And how successful they are after they enter the university to go to worst degree completion. I mean, that's a very tough equation and again, it's a global scale competition. You know, we're competing with other states, we're competing with the world. So we really have to improve and work more with K through 12. And I know guy who is back there is working with schools extensively to address this. I mean, there are high schools that have a 10% attainment rate. You know, like basically their ability to do college level work is at 10% I mean, that's just. Very concerning to us and the real perhaps option that we have. And we talked many times the pros, going to talk some more as our Associates degrees, a portfolio of Associates degrees, we have the Associate in Arts program that has experienced its own challenges the last few years. To be perfectly honest, you know, from our highest enrollment of about 900 students that we had, you know, just as the pandemic started, just like everybody else, community colleges and the like in the country. We took a dive down to 589 total number of enrolled students across all campuses. I mean, Alson, I'm sure you've experienced things like this at Delta and now we've been bringing it back up to 641, we've got to bring that number to 1,000 students, you know. And I think when we do that be more comfortable to us because like 85% of those students end up coming here for four year degrees. So that'd be the way to infill and make sure that we catch up with the loss of the Delawarians that we currently experience. But overall, as I said before, uh, with more applications coming every year, with the size of our first year full time class being pretty constant right now at about 4,200 The percent of students that we offer admission will continue to go down some more and more competitive to get In a year ago, we're at 73% of those who are applying were offered admission to the main campus. Now we're at 64% Again, I'm looking at my crystal ball. Within five years, be 50% of those who apply. That's still phenomenal. We're providing phenomenal access. 50% we're never going to be Harvard like 4% of those who apply get admitted. We don't want to be, but we're not going to be able to bring everybody in, because lots of people deserve to be here. And we have limited capacity. I'll pause here to see if you have any questions because this is important. I think it sets the stage for all the work we do. Dennis, did I hear you correct that 1,000 would be our goal for the Associate program? If we think about target 1,000 students, I mean, the Provost is doing with the deans and others, a multi year enrollment plan. But I definitely think we have capacity, a huge capacity, in our Associate programs. For example, in Wilmington. You know, we've leased two floors in the community education building. Two floors. Clearly we have capacity for more than the number of students that we have there. We can probably increase it 20, 30% and wouldn't know it, you know. Laura, would you like to comment? What's your sense of the crystal ball And there's how many take all the sites. Georgetown, Louis, you know. Yeah. Think there's a couple of ways to standing off, we'll be brief here, but one way is to think about where that 641 comes from. And that's from a lot of work on Rodney and his team identifying students who may not be quite ready for starting right on new our campus. And so the associated program has some great wraparound services to help students test out that they're ready for college and become ready. And then the idea is that they transfer room for expansion. Is that a lot of those students are picked from us. They're not selecting the associates program, they're not immediately applying there. And so there's a lot we can do. I think around holding up that program for the jewel that it is like here. This is a great way for you to start college, right? I'll talk about some other ideas about expansion in my comments. Great. The next one I wanted to share with you is our progress towards enhancing diversity throughout the campus. And let me just start by saying we have more conversations today about the Supreme Court decision and affirmative action and all that. We certainly view diversity as very broad and inclusivity in most broad terms. In this particular slice, what we're looking at as domestic represent minority undergraduates or newer campus. It's obviously important and interesting to us and the way this is defined, in particular, it counts Black and Hispanic students in some other categories which are much more in percent Asian students are not included in this. So what you've seen, in my opinion, tremendous progress we've made out of those 18,000 students that we have on main campus from 2,665.2016 steady. Little by little, year after year, that number has gone to 3505. And I want to make sure that everybody understands. We're not working against any quota or anything. I mean, this happened in many ways, naturally, by providing access and more scholarship support to people and ensuring that they can be successful. So we're very proud of that in particular. I'm extremely proud of what you see in the right there, which is the improvements we've made in the DNA of the Delawarean class, because every so often people write in the local newspapers or politicians ask and say, the university is not diverse enough. There's not diverse enough. And you know, number one, our relevant set for that should be the state of Delaware and what is the population in the state of Delaware? And, you know, when I see this progress from 19.6% we're now 28.7% that's approaching the DNA of the state of Delaware. You know, it's over 30% I'm sure because the Hispanic populations have experienced tremendous growth in Delaware, especially in south in Delaware. But this is something you know, to cheer up for. We've made notable progress and you can tell by walking the campus. And I can tell you, not too long ago Len and I were walking the Penn State Campus. There's no diversity on that campus. You know, we're there for a football game, why else would we be there? You know, and we won't talk about the football game, but certainly I can talk about the lack of diversity around the campus. Speaking of diversity, women's in service and education, the white programs as an initiative, we're very proud of What you see here in this selfie is our graduates with myself, the Afghani ladies that came here and I'm sure you've read a lot about it and local newspapers. Great story. I don't know what Matt Kin serve is. I definitely want to give credit to Matt. He's been the champion for this program. We decided to bring in a fraction of women. Students from Afghanistan were displaced by the Taliban regime and they still wanted to seek D education. Their careers were interrupted, they went away from their families. They were very concerned for themselves and their families when they first landed here, as they were dressed very conservatively, would cover their face, you know, bakers and the like and would never want to be in a picture two years later, completely westernized, integrated, included lots of friends, they are running to be included in selfish. In particular, they all graduated from the program except one where the very, very beginning was extremely lonely, Left, went back Afghanistan, all graduated including one Iranian student was in that cohort table, matriculated from a line out to the university. So that's an amazing success story and we got credit for that. And chronicle of higher education voice for America, so many other places, we probably got more publicity out of this than many other things we've done last year. So I just want to mention that because certainly it's a success story. Another one is we need to be touting our whole more for what we've done with study abroad. We invented it clearly 100 years ago, 1923, now it's 100 years. We had a wonderful reception at the French Embassy. Lamazon Francis, this past June, Senator Konz was there. Ambassador Lee opened their house for us in addition to what we've done at the event. Because certain people attend the event, we're very intentional to invite to the event some of those counselors who basically advice from foreign universities, representatives, organizations that bring international students to the US. To come and join us. Because the International Association of Those Counselors and Professionals had their annual conference in Washington DC. So we bombarded the airports around there first time we try that, I'm sure that all of you have experienced same frustration that I have. When you go to the Philadelphia airport, you see things about Temple, and Drexel, and Penn, and everybody else never about University 0. So we decided to do a better test with Glenn and his team and went to, you know, the BWI and Reagan and Dallas airports. And you could see people were stopping by, see what's that, you know, celebrating her years. Who is this universe? What are the blue hens? And so I think by doing more of that, especially in the Philly region, uh, will help us. Right. Plan that's an objective. How much did it cost? I think it was a good deal. Yeah, I think it was 15,000 or something. But we were to negotiate the university purchasing. We did because we started with one airport and then we got all three. Okay. So we do more of that. The bottom line. Like for example, the APLU conference is happening in Seattle. We'll have about 45000 professionals organizations from the public and London universities. Do you want to have something when you land in Seattle airport? I don't know, but you know, When we go to PLU, there's always one or two of those schools that give you mugs. They give you coasters. They give you something. Dell was never given anything, anybody. And I don't know how do you expect that will be known. The other thing we're trying to do is have some of our people actually speaking panels. I mean, I've been encouraging the administrators to go and be more visible in the APLU. We typically bring a team of about ten Elena, I've always been going and trying to mingle with presidents and um, the partners and spouses of presidents. I mean, there are different groups, but there's groups for philanthropy, there's groups for student life. I mean, Jose has been a regular. Glenn has been coming more recently. The vice for research has always been coming. And for example, the other day, Kelvin and myself and Angie, it was Angie's idea. We talked about we always do a day in DC. So not all the university a day in DC. So why don't we become speakers at the panel this time to brag about our day in DC again, You know, if others imitate you, that's great, right? I mean, you know, then you are perceived as a leader. We put in application to be designated APU University for Economic Development and Prosperity. I mean, we deserve that. Nobody has something like the star campus, but we have not received the award. We've, I think, pitched in to receive an award for degree completion. We have never received that award. It's probably take us a few iterations because we need to be kind of players, But I think those are good things for us. Okay. Athletics. Another great thing for us lately. First thing I want to brag about is the win against Stonybrook at Stonybrook. Mi, being in the field, you know, cheering for athletes. So this picture is amazing. By the way, the football team is now ranked ninth and tenth nationally. And I think I have already arrested for success because last year, last week we did not play. And by not playing, we jumped one in rank. So the more stars we don't play, the higher we'll be rank. No, that's a joke. But you know we're ninth and tenth now and I'm pretty sure we'll do very well against Duquesne. I mean, if we don't, I don't know what to say, but we really do have a good chance to win the title this year in our division Women's soccer. Great first win over Power School against Syracuse Men Soccer. We beat Rutgers five big Ten champion last year. These are really amazing accomplishments. Volleyball are very well, but probably the best accomplishment is the student athlete GPA. For many years now they're running, We've been over three. And actually right now last year, PA the average is 3.3 That's very high. It's probably the highest we've had certainly in a very long time, but I think it might be the highest we've ever had. Low students are close to 4.0 students. I mean, we have some amazing student athletes in that group. So very, very proud of that. And I think the Whitney Center has been a transformative experience for athletes, students. First, just a quick word about a, this is the President, Student Advisory Council, and it's 17 individuals that basically mostly are comprised of undergraduates, 13.4 graduate students. You have the president of the undergraduate government, the graduate student government. Among them. Those are students who are brilliant. I mean, they're very well selected from students that have been nominated. I don't select them, but a panel of staff members here select students. And, you know, they're nominated by administrators, by faculty. They bring a lot of experiences. They represent the campus very well. Maybe at one of these retreats will bring a few of those students for you to interact with. It's just unbelievable the kinds of topics we talk about. Typically, they're the ones that the students care today about diversity and inclusion, gender based violence, community relations with the police. We had people for public safety come there. The chief and Jason came, and people enjoyed interacting with them. The openness, free speech, so many important topics. And this semester, we're talking especially about civil discourse. And it is free speech week. And I just didn't oped, by the way. If any of you have insomnia and you want to read something, that's a great piece of work. But I want to say that it is important for our students to be able to have this discourse in a civil manner about all kinds of issues, even if they disagree. Now I'm going to turn our folks to graduate education, and Louis here to answer any question that you know, you may want to have answered. And that I cannot answer, basically, first, the focus on enrollment. The absolute number of graduate students, as you could see right now, is near its peak. A little bit off the peak that we experienced in 2021, but not by much. The real stories are that the international body of students, the yellow is continue to increase. That's actually pretty impressive. Year after year post pandemic, we're bounding very, very nicely with international students now at 15 89. On the other hand, with domestic students, we're experiencing a struggle, real struggle. We're now at the 2019 levels. That's a cause for concern. Let me speak about the concern first and then the remedies and also why we're experiencing an increase in international students. The challenge is being able to provide our graduate students competitive statements in housing. Not too long ago, we're under $20,000 for the minimum stipend, and now we're going to 2025. And we are working to give a nine month stipend of 27,000 With the next 23 years, others in the vicinity like Rutgers, have announced the same window of time. They go to 30,000 others. What they do, they basically provide a stipend not for nine months, but for 12 months. We're working with the Provost and the Deans to make this a reality by involving them in teaching, in special sessions, for example, doing other things. It's very important, especially in areas like the humanity, social sciences, the arts. There is a whole lot of external funding other than foundations sometimes to provide for the stipends of those doctoral students. We have to think about that very carefully. And as I said, the minimum stipend is important for, especially those disciplines. You know, people are in chemical engineering, you can pay them $50,000 whatever your grant can bear. You can pay them whatever you want. We're as competitive as Mit or anybody. That's why we get the best students. But not everybody is able to be part of those sponsored programs. That's our challenge. The other part is housing people, especially international students. They come from abroad. They have no credit, no credit card, no bank account. They land here in August and they have no place to live. And some of them don't like that, especially if other universities provide housing. And this and that. After a little while that we had a pose on providing graduate housing. We retired conover those apartments, we lost I think 90 beds this semester. We provided Lou working with Jose and John Long and financial people. Everybody, we were able to provide about 100 units. And those were different configurations? Not necessarily, it's more like hard beds because some were apartment style, some were suite style, some were studios. We're trying to figure out what's the best configuration, you want to comment at all about that experiment. It was successful. Successful. That was good. That's good. But are the students appreciative or oh, they think we should have done that five years ago? Well, I'll say that this year, and I think it's attributable to the pilot. Last year we had a lot of pressure from incoming students not being able to find a place to live. Like they were staying with friends for a month or two. Until this year, there's none of that. So whenever I greet new graduate students, I always ask them, how did you find the housing market? And I have not heard a complaint yet. So I think we have succeeded in at least reducing the extreme pressure, but we need to keep working on it, refining our pilot. So we'll use this pilot to figure out what kinds of housing we need to inform our housing plan. What are the price points, the types of configurations. And hopefully we'll continue to be more competitive on the domestic students, especially with the combination of the stipends and housing the international students. What I want to show you is there is a shift which it wasn't just accidental. We, as you see at this world map and which a bit hard to read red areas where we've decreased our dependency on that, China where we've increased significantly is India. It's a good shift for us, there is a lot of qualified people. It's a very big country and also a lot of wealthy people coming from those countries, from India in particular. Nigeria has grown for us. Again, this is a lot of people think 250 million in Nigeria. Some areas of South America are great for us. Middle East has been strong, but the numbers are overall. Low. We've experienced some declines from Europe, from countries in Europe, but the numbers from there were never very high. So I think overall, there is a positive shift. That's why we're growing in international enrollments. The other area where we have continued to grow, because that's our strategic plan, is in the renewal and growth of our faculty. So there are two stories on this slide. The one is the growth of the faculty from about 1,200 to 13 20, about 01:20 net new. The bigger story is that represents probably over 550 new faces that have come on board in my time since 2016. And if you track that, the yellow curve there shows basically the percent of the faculty that are newly hired, let's say within the last five years at any given point. Right now we're at 40% new. Since 2016, and really the first few years we didn't have a significant percent. Last five years, including the pandemic, we've managed to change the DNA of the distribution of the faculty to 40% newly hired, a lot of dynamism, it's fantastic. Most of these people are very scholarly research active. They understand that it's about teaching, research, scholarly work, and service extension, everything, the three legs of the stool. And, you know, with all that, of course, our research volume has increased very significantly. So you could see here, you know, we were in the $150,000,000 range for total expenditures for about 89 years before. And now we're 326. That's research, the blue bar, and the addition of instructional and public service activities which are funded, brings us to 326. My prediction is if we continue those runs at a six to 10% growth for a few more years will be at a half $1 billion within five years. And this is just doing math that's very significant for institution of our size. I mean, that's pretty unbelievable. That's why I keep saying, you know, we have all the making of combining the best elements of a top performing US News type of school and a top performing AU type of school. And one of these days, we will make sure that people recognize that you know, and we will be invited to join the EU. I should say that last year, in a surprise move, AU decided to deviate from their longstanding 60 domestic schools and 22 Canadian. And they invited four schools, including places like University of South Florida. I personally think we're better than University of South Florida. But you know that John Long came from there. So since he's not here, I'm picking on him. So I think we can do it. Of course, this amazing faculty, just a segue need doctoral students. You can't be bringing those people and not having three to four doctoral students to work with. And that's why I keep saying to me the slow growth of doctoral students is concerning to me with the continued growth of research grants. You solve it one of two ways you bring more doctoral students in. That's Lou, or the faculty work with everybody, Provost and the vision for research to bring in more postdocs and more research scientists. We need a very strong research scientists truck. In addition to the teaching truck, the CT that we have wi's amazing here. So those are the things we need to do as far as facilities, I'll be quick here. We continue to add great facilities because great faculty need to educate great students and great facilities. So Drake addition 20,000 square feet of space or so. About $20,000,000 opened in spring of 2023. So that's really nice with chemistry by chemistry labs, we continue to enhance that Fintech. We had an amazing ribbon cutting event and a celebration. My thanks to Mary for providing the picture before OCM people could provide me the picture. You know, it's really so fresh. It was last night, so we're doing good work around midnight to make sure we have the latest. But it was attended by a lot of representatives, politicians, you know, chair of the assembly, Scola. So Very good. And the two co directors, I know Carlos is here. Carlos, yeah, yeah. Carlos Art and Rudy Eigenmann representing engineering and business. Very excited about this. Also excited about the new leaders that bring fresh energy to UD, certainly within the last two years, and some of them fresh. Let me see. I know Amy is here. Maybe you can stand up. Yeah, yeah, stand up. So can see you from Biden School. Oliver. Yo from learner. You have Bill Farfer here from Health Science. And Fabrice. I know I've seen Fabrice somewhere. Yes, Fabrice, by the way, organized with his team, an excellent coast day this past Sunday. I think the tours to the vessel sharp were like, you know, Helen enjoyed it so much. Went all the way down to the double bottoms to check the engines, you know. But I think we are 2,500 people who went just on the vessel alone. It was about 8,000 who visited the campus. How many do you think? Around about 8,000 Gorgeous day, you know, after all the rain, I mean, if you have not been to a coast day, you should next year, just like, especially for kids, you know, it was an amazing celebration. Then let's see, Angela Chen. Angela POT coming to us from NYU. Angela Downing coming to us from Minnesota, Our general counsel, nor a lot of Angela's who've been hiring this year. There's also another Angela the controller. So it was the name of the summer, Amy Turner, our PO financing treasurer came to us from Duke and I just checked her office because I always had this curiosity if the treasurer has a vault in the office and you do have a vault. A little vault. So I mean, safe. Yeah, it's very good. Current searches, the arts and science. First, let me make it clear, we have a fantastic arts and science Interim Dean. Debbie, please stand up. We're searching for permanent Dean, College of Engineering. Dean Levi will be stepping down and we will thank Levi with service and we'll be announcing the search committee. I think this week, maybe Monday. An thank Calvin for his service. I know Calvin is here wrapping up. Oh, Levi, I'm sorry, could you please stand up so that we can recognize you as well? We serve there. Thank you also for serving during this year while we're searching for your successor. Won't be an easy thing. Calvin? I think I've seen Calvin the morning we hear. Please tell him I mentioned him. So, we are going to wrap up the search. We just brought in one of five finalists this Tuesday, and the next four Tuesdays, we'll wrap it up. And vice Ps for research. Kelvin Lee continues to be the vices for research service and innovation. And we're continuing with the committee that is two thirds continuing and one third refreshed. And we're actually starting to talk with candidates right now, new sets of finalists, because we were not able to close the deal actually with the preferred candidate last year. So that happens sometimes with spousal placements involved. Okay, now I'm going to pivot quickly to just give you a sense of the institutional goals. As Terry said, we really want you to get a sense of what are we working on right now, although I think the backdrop you've already heard about this is very important. And I'll start by saying, when I first started here, John Cochrane gave me an instruction to reduce two volumes about this thick of bond materials that described the institutional goals. They were different for every VP and it was clear there was no communication among the leadership team. So even if everybody accomplished all those goals, never move the institution, They were just good things for every one area, but not in the same direction. So what we've done is we have reduced them to this here bound volume that is about my finger in terms of thickness. And we cheated because we printed the double sided, but nonetheless, it was much thinner. And I've distilled it further for this presentation to one slide because some of the trustees still kept telling me, you know, we just need five. We can't think of more than five. So they're simple. We live and die with enrollments, right? I mean, 45% of our budget depends on enrollment, undergrad, and grad enrollments. So having an intentional multi year enrollment plan at both levels is very important. And Laura would talk more about this because she's leading the effort with Rodney and others. And this involves every office, you know, the CFO office, IR facilities, student life enrollment is not just like, okay, what's the size of the class? Okay, let me go and make some offers. It's much more complicated than that. Along with it, and perhaps intimately connected with it, is the multi year. Faculty and staff and staff hiring plan And with that as well retention plan to ensure that we have competitive compensations and all the rest. So those two work together, right? I mean, you need to have enrollments in the right areas where we have faculty to teach them and do research and the right facilities that come along. Of course, if you have the right faculty, student staff group, you can celebrate diversity and inclusion. And clearly what we have been doing this year as part of our strategic pillar, diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice, is launch a number of initiatives that align with a strategic plan and advance equity within those groups. The last two are really the enablers of our intellectual capital, and we've got to have a multi year capital plan, short term, mid term, and long term. The buildings and grounds committee will see more of that, the unveiling of it, you know, the prioritization, I'll speak to it briefly. And a ten year financial plan that has both operating and capital budgets. I'm really proud of how this thing fits together, these goals. And I think they should be informing all the work that we do at committees as Terry always wanted. And I'll just give you a little bit more because Laura will talk more about the enrollment and other aspects. First of all, on the multi year enrollment plan, you know, the three big pillars which ultimately culminate in student success is providing access to people and ensuring that all our goals are met. You know, by providing that, including meeting the financial needs of our students, we have a lot of students in need more. So after the pandemic, we have the objective to continue to have a diverse institution and diversity at the broadest levels. We're going to have an entire panel that will basically discuss how we can continue to accomplish our goals there. Given the recent rulings of the Supreme Court, we absolutely want to work towards the completion of the degree programs that are students sick, and ideally in four years. Completion is a very loaded term. Obviously you want to lead them to the finished line, but you don't want to lose people in the pipeline. So retention is a key part of completion. So what we want there is to ensure that the leaky pipeline at all levels is less leaky, right, from first year to second year. Right now our percent retention, as I mentioned, is 91% So we lose 9% from the get go. You know, right at the end of the first year, we need to bring that up. 92% 93% How do you bring it up? Obviously, advising, tutoring support, you know, we talked about the math challenges that we have with our students. That's one component. The other component is to increase the stickiness of the students to this environment. That's where the student experience and student life come in. Obviously, we want the students have a very good time and rich experiences. But at the same time, we won't be able to quantify how well we're doing. And I think student life will start having quantitative goals, starting with this year on how they're contributing to the retention of students. I mean, at the end of the day, as we say, we have some of these amazing facilities and abilities. The Warner halls, the student unions, everything else we're doing to be able to contribute to the experience of the student learning in the class, the learning outside the class, and ultimately lead them to great outcomes. The post graduate outcomes, which by the way, here's new tracks now and more deliberately. So all of this works together. I'll save the detail for Laura here, but one thing I want to especially highlight is the student experience master plan, which is in the works last year, and now it's going to basically cross the finish line. And so Jose is leading that effort with a number of stakeholders and I wanted to just highlight one component of it, which is of course, we know one component is housing, but another component is the social experiences that the students have at different places. You know, sometimes people think the way to deal with it is we go and demolish Perkins and we built another big student union. We put $250,000,000 And of course, first we have to raise it and find the money, and then ten years later we solve the problem. But. We don't have ten years to wait. That's my point. And to be clear, knowing that every one of our student unions has been named after the president of the university have a vested interest to see a new student union one day. But we need to find something quicker, you know, in our lifetimes. So one of the thoughts that we have is if we look at, you know, what is the lived experience of a student. You know the student arc if you wish. You know, starting from the north campus and going towards the south campus, there are a lot of significant stops along the way like Penk, Traband, other things that we could put as part of it. Right here is Perkins. So what if we continue to think about the reimagination of Ollen Hall as a student centric place. The Morris Library as a student centric place with fewer books and more gathering spaces, learning commons. So, you know, if we re, imagine the pencater dining hall, perhaps provide a student union feel to it, a gathering for the north campus, and we continue to bring that philosophy all the way down. We might be able to do this, especially as we breathe new life into old buildings with class enclosures and things in our lifetimes and not 1015 years down the road. So I'm awaiting so much jose for the outcomes of this because I think it'll be very transformative on the multi year faculty and hiring plan. What I will say is obviously this planet support university goals. I talked before about the 550 faculty that we have hired in the last five years. If you just look at demographic information and I want to make clear that our faculty like to work here till they're really, really old. But at some point, you know, people do retire, I think we do project. Over the next five years there'll be another 500 or so positions, they'll turn. That's you think about the percent that would be hired within the last ten years. Brand new DNA, if you will. And so that's important. How do we hire the right kinds of faculty to support the faculty hiring plans in every department college? Where do we want to position those colleges? How do we support those positions? With net tuition revenue and external funding? How does philanthropy come up and support this effort with endowed chairs and the like? Obviously, we want to retain the highest faculty and compensate them at the highest levels. So that's important. And on the staff side, we have to do the same kind of thing and Melissa will tell you. We're also going to see rejuvenation of our staff body over the next several years. It's purely biological, Just to be clear, we have no objectives to reduce the force or anything like that, but, you know, things do change, we're not eternal. And so, with that in mind, not only we need to be thinking about attracting and retaining, but also to have continuity plans in place. You know what if this person you won the lottery? I mean, we need to have a plan. And so we've been talking with Terry and other trustees, Lisa, myself, and others. We're going to work very hard with the senior leaders in all areas to make sure that the right kinds of continuity plans, particularly anticipating the future and realigning the organizational structures, the policies, the procedures to enhance our operational excellence. So this is an exciting time perhaps at times and I think artists is here somewhere listening at times. It's too exciting, you know all the HR work, but it's important work advancing equity. I will say that we're pivoting from developing plans to actually putting those plans in action. We say equity in action. So a couple of quick highlights here. The first one, we just had a fantastic event that brought to campus two leaders from Columbia and Princeton to faculty, leaders that have written book, Sexual Citizens. And they talked about equitable approaches to create more awareness to protect their students from gender based intimate partner violence. And our center in that area basically organized a very, very nice, very well attended workshop, all day workshop last Friday. And it was Thursday, that was one step. Another step is we have the campus grant for students with children. Laura, you may say something more or look and say something more about it. We're launching an equitable leadership academy which will target different times. Training of about 25 mid career professionals that will learn about leadership and equity and diversity, very important for the institution. And last but not least, John Long has been working with a lot of you and basically with Vicky Daniels who is champion championing this effort. To bring suppliers diverse in the community. We had a conference that was organized at Clayton Hall that brought hundreds of prospective suppliers, diverse suppliers and the University, new people. And I think this effort is going to be great. The last thing I'll say in this chapter for equity and inclusion, as we repurpose space at Perkins, which kind of fits the theme I was saying before, let's do some things today, not wait ten years. When we decanted the counseling and wellness center that we have at Perkins with the creation of Warner Hall, we basically took down all the partitions and created some very nice space at Perkins, which now, uh, is called our Center for Intercultural Engagement. Places packed with students brings together a lot of interesting dialogues. It has some offices in the perimetery for some clubs and some administrators, not a whole lot conference rooms that you can schedule. A food pantry. Clothing pantry. But more important thing is space in the middle that's reconfigurable for activities to happen. And I want to invite all of you at the ribbon cutting ceremony, which is this Friday, 3-5 Hopefully, you can join us there. Last couple of things, a comprehensive multi year capital plan. We absolutely need that. That should basically cover both, as I said before, short term and long term objectives, as well as medium term in between. We're doing some things now, you can't miss them. The bulldozers are out there. We need to continue to move current capital projects forward. At the same time address issues in buildings that have accumulated deferred maintenance. That absolutely critical. Talked about the housing plan and what's critical is, as we look at capital priorities for the next few years, make sure they're informed by enrollment plans, by the research, growth, and other things we need to be doing for the state and the region. Last thing is we want to make sure that we're leveraging the advent of remote work and hybrid work and repurpose spaces that are under utilized. And we have lots of those around campus, particularly in some administrative areas. And we're taking a very hard look at some of those buildings and the opportunities that we have, just some images here. I know Terry would love this one. Spencer Lab, Mechanical Engineering, uh, you know, 14,000 square feet. If anybody has ever walked into Spencer, this is like and I different, and we didn't have to wait 50 years to see it. Basically, space to design, work with labs, and workshops, and collaboration. And you can do anything from metal working to carpentry, 14,000 square feet of space, which is amazing. Levi has been working on a strategic plan for the facility of the College of Engineering. And basically, decision came down to like, there are buildings that have good guts like Spencer, but need attention. There's others that need to come down, and those you would have to consolidate them one day when we're successful. A development efforts with a new building for engineering on start. So that's kind of the game plan. So it's good to have that roadmap because we know where to put money. Not all requests are equal, but this makes a difference. Building X is going to make a huge difference. A big project has come in a bit, overweighting. Budget before the pandemic is $120 million and now it's approaching $180 million. But it's going to be an amazing project serving more than 1,000 students and bringing together all the interdisciplinary areas in neuroscience and science, human disease, quantum size and engineering. 50 PIs in one building. It's going to be a really gorgeous building. Amazing, I mean, I think this, for one thing, will propel our psychology brain science department to the top 50 within a couple of years. I think, especially with some strategic hiring that area. Some of you were asking me this morning, that's why we put this slide there. Right there where it is. The parking lot in front of Mors, and that little green area will be replaced right across froms with a residential project. Basically, the Buccinipolan Group will build a 230,000 square foot apartment complex. High end for professionals who work on Star campus with restaurants parking, covered by pool deck and restaurant. It's going to be amazing, so we can't wait for them to break around hopefully within the next month or two. And this is a project that a lot of you know much less about. So I thought I would show you this. Beyond Star, everybody now has the horizon star. Back in like 72 we acquired, I think it was Governor Castle, he gave us the Delaware Technologies Park space. It was basically Almost cornfield there, you know, at the time. And you know, that's developed very nicely that area around Delaware Technology Park. I learned from Melissa Gary, that's new apartments that grow restaurants. I mean, that place is booming. Used to be I think a Kmart and all that. It's really transformed and we're right in there. Delaware Technology Park was the first incubator that the state built with us, you know, to try to take companies from the university and out and grow them there. And, you know, little by little, that has been growing very nicely, you know, and we have also stories where those companies move to other incubators and then to their own spaces. So the last lot remaining on seven acres is going to be built a partnership with this group, Shear Partners. 5,000 square feet of space they're going to built there and we expect that we'll have wet lab space in the biotech area. That's growing very fast. I want to remind people that there are no more empty lots, and now people are actually acquiring some of the existing buildings. And certainly the University of Delaware, who owns already the land and has leased that, Delaware Technology Park has bought back from this entity, Delaware Technology Park, two buildings so far when they were paid up. Basically, one is DBI and the other one is the Fran Hoofer building that used to be the Franhofer building and now it is the Center for Hydrogen Research in partners with mor very exciting things happening there as well. Maybe at some point we'll tour that last 110 year financial plan developing very nicely dovetails with enrollment targets, the financial aid, the discount rates, scholarship budgets, the capital budgets, all of those. To be clear, we have a target to return operating margin of 3% to 5% So that's important for us so that we can one day be able to float another bond. And finance some of the ambition with some money we borrow as well. Hopefully by then the interest rates will be down. We are developing now some of those plans, both the financial and the capital that goes with it, will present to the relevant committees. One of the important levers beyond tuition is innovation and development, right? So these are monies that to some extent will always help us and we'll reduce our dependency on tuition, external revenue on the innovation. Just highlighting the success of the biopharma, where basically we started with the intellectual capital we had from DBI. And little other than that. And before we knew it, we built right here, the Amon Pinizoo building, right across from us. About $180,000,000 building, beautiful building. But more importantly, we put there the nimble after competition we want federally. And I think to date it has brought over $500 million approach, I think 600 at this point from industry, state governments, federal government in particular. Uh, and as part of it, I want to show you that the ambition is not stopping with this one, but kitty corner from this, there's a nice lot and we're going to be hopefully building there a 90,000 square foot building for saber. You see rendering here. This is right now science fiction. We're still considering the details, but basically this is going to be about $150,000,000 project. And at this moment in time, we've raised about 75 from the federal and state government. So we're continuing to get more. Some of you might have seen an announcement in Delaware News yesterday about another $10,000,000 tranche that came in. It's for this project, so it's securing American bio manufacturing research and education. So what we'll have is a place to train according to the best manufacturing practices. Labor for the growing manufacturing industry, the workers, but also the ability to run pilot batches and scale up for new biopharma drugs, particularly vaccines. Think about some crisis erupting in some part of the world and needing a vaccine for the next Ebola virus. And we need to send very quickly 50,000 vaccines. And we could do that, we could ramp it up right there and set it out truly make a difference in public health. Another one that some of you know a lot about and some don't and would love you to have a tour is the Delaware Innovation Space. The Delaware Innovation Space is a partnership we created in 17 it's as long as our campaign for philanthropy. So it was a partnership we created with Dupont and the state of Delaware when actually Dupont was going to be dissolved as the old company and merged with Dow. And then resize its facilities at experimental stations. So we picked up one of the nicest buildings, 200,000 square foot building, and we created an incubator. And the purpose was to try to transfer ideas and technologies from a lot of places within the state and incubate them to the point of creating something big. An example is prelude therapeutic. Some of you know that that company has gone public. Another one that you know less about Is versus Gen is a company that our faculty member, Yan Yan, started with his postdocs and from the labs here with our ideas and our patents, you know, which were licensed. The company went and created a site at Delaware Innovation Space. And that site actually now has migrated to the FMC. Stein Haskell, the entire new building, and they're raising $50,000,000 in round two financing. So just we wish that they're very successful. Because the more successful they are, the more philanthropy one day will get and our patents will be worth more, right? So innovation is very important as another part of our DNA, and we hope there'll be another source of revenue. What I'm very proud of, I'm the chair of the board of that entity, and basically, we've now raised $1 billion by the startups that have been incubated there. That's a big landmark. It puts us up there with some other very successful incubators of The biggest pride here is the billion dollars we raised for a campaign that was just wrapped up this past June, thanks to all of you, billion for enabling what we've done. I'll pose here questions, Dennis. Thank you. That was a lot of material. You have all this in your sleep. This has been great. So we'll have a chance, I think, to mingle. What we're going to do is mix the schedule a little bit just to a ten minute break. I think everyone needs. And then we're going to have La. Come up and we have some from Laura. A quick update from Laura. We're going to take a break now. Yeah. I'm reading the room and we're going 10 minutes. Okay. Come back. All right. All right.
10-05-2023-President's Remarks
From Jason Kramer October 09, 2023
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