CHRIS MEINIG: The last talk today is we're going to go through the Engineering group. I'm going to go over our basic group. And you're going to meet a lot of these people on the tour today. So we're a group of 16 people. Five engineers and five technicians. We have interdisciplinary skills. You'll see in our Machine Shop for example, we saw the lead machinist and the welder. He also goes out to sea to deploy moorings. Some of our software developers can also go and meet a deck force out on a ship. So having these interdisciplinary skills really brings benefit across the board. We're involved in 90% of the lab's steel programs. There are some of our customers that range across the board from researchers here across fellow program managers, NOAA operations, industry, and foreign government partners. Our functions-- we have engineering shops. We have labs, a form prototype machine shop. We have a mooring shop that you're not going to get to see today on the tour. That's over in Building 32. We support the field work. And we also have a 38-foot research boat that allows us to do some of the work out in Puget Sound, along with a $3 million equipment pool that we manage for the lab's benefit. Fortunately, with your ticket today, you're going to get to see the tour. So these are things that can be-- you can walk through later. Right after this meeting, we'll leave from right outside that door. Our relevance is shown in this slide here. Of the total EDD funding that we get, base funding, we leverage that times 3. So every dollar that comes in, we provide $3. We do that by being involved in a lot of proposals. Typically, 13 to 15 proposals per year, with many commercial partnerships that we're able to leverage those and extend out into the community. So [INAUDIBLE] we establish with our counterparts. Presently within engineering, we have eight transitions underway. Our one patent license is an ongoing discussion. We like hearing from them. They have experiences in the field, working with these eight different countries. So think of it as a feedback loop. Operations back to, hey, what might the next product look like? What are some things that would make it more reliable? So that's an ongoing discussion. We're involved with eight different NOAA partners in three programs. To the right is some of the examples of some improvements that we have. I'm going to go through three of those right now, just three examples. One of them is our Autonomous Surface Vehicle CO2 system. Now, this is a system that measures the pCO2 flux from the air to the sea. It measures air measurements as well. This was an outlay of a discontinued MAPCO2 system, which was transitioned to commercial partners, and then they stopped building. So what happens? It comes back, right? So we needed to develop further examples to make it work on autonomous surface vehicles now. We do science-driven design. We build the prototypes. You'll get to see some of this on the tour. And ultimately, we want to transfer that knowledge to the technology. There's partners that we're working with. And co-integrating this into the vehicle is really important. You have to know the platform that you're integrating into it to avoid bias. So we work closely with the platform developers to make that happen. But ultimately, we're going to develop this community of users between scientists, engineers, and other platform developers. Another program that we've done in the last four years is our Oculus Underwater Glider. Now, this is based out of Seaglider, and Deepglider core designs. And it's actually a really good example of how the University and the federal research lab can work together. There was a lot of great things in the Core Seaglider and Deepglider design that we said, "Wait a minute. We've identified a gap in the [INAUDIBLE] program that we didn't have." What we didn't have was a glider that was fast, was a truck that would work in the coastal environments. We leveraged some of those things from the UWIP. We built an entirely new buoyancy engine. So that buoyancy engine now allows us to go at greater speed, carry more and go further. So a marathoner. Think of a regular seaglider as a marathoner, but don't ask him to hike through the woods with a big backpack. What we have here is the equipment of a go-fast truck that is integrated now in the Hydroid's product line across the board between the Seaglider, Deepglider, and now the Oculus has specifically addressed missions in the coastal area at less than 200-meter depths. A third thing that we've been working on these last five years, is advanced GPS systems. So what we do is we incorporate state-of-the-art GPS systems on top of buoys to solve emissions [INAUDIBLE]-- this is the NASA JPL named SWOT. It surveys the surface water and ocean topography, where the altimeter is now going to have a SWOT scan across. So the trick is how we would measure that in situ to calibrate it properly. What we've done is we've integrated a high-precision GPS with our NASA JPL partners. We've incorporated tilt sensors. We've bundled up with a data logger. And we've proven that we can get centimeter-level resolution out in the open ocean. This is on par with what we can do on land. So these are things that are getting rapidly developed, and we're incorporating them into buoy systems. We just recovered one system off the coast of California to do that. And what's cool here, is we've incorporated with three other PMEL technologies. That included a PRAWLER to get the hydrograph properties of the water column, and a bottom pressure gauge that gives us something about sea surface height and depth. All three of those were deployed at [INAUDIBLE]. Some of the challenges we're working on, is really the time allocation. If you look at the graph on the right, we have both a mixed mission. That we are both innovators, yet we also support the operations that go on here. This is a study that I did a while ago. And it's that constant push for this R&D and Ops support. The urgent frequently trumps what's important. Whenever some ship needs help, we need to stand up for that, and you're putting the innovation off to the side to respond that. There's some other challenges in there. One particularly we're trying to do is improve our diversity of recruitment across the engineering field. I'm really pleased with this. In the last four years, we've been honored to receive several medals at the Department of Commerce level and at the NOAA level. And what's cool with this is, over 50% of these are group awards. We combine the engineering and science together across technicians, engineers, and scientists. And this speaks to what the heart of the lab is all about. It's this combination of innovating together closely. So in summary, engineering has been a core activity of the lab. We're integrated across all the field programs. There's certainly opportunities to address some new technology in our upcoming strategic plan. And quality and relevance, performance is demonstrated by our results, collaborations. And I think if you were to ask any of our partners, that would be the best mirror to hold up that speaks to our efforts. So I want to thank our partners and sponsors. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]