Jodi: Hi. I am Jodi Cohen, your host. And I’m really honored to be joined by Dr. Robert Melillo. He is a well-known functional neurologist. He specializes in neurodevelopmental disorders and brain imbalances.
He is a very well-known author, researcher and has helped thousands of patients, children, and adults, all over the world with complex neurological symptoms.
The Melillo Method is used in his practice to identify brain imbalances and treat many symptoms of mental attention, behavioral, and learning disorders. Welcome, and thank you for being here.
Dr. Melillo: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Jodi: So I’m curious how you define resilience.
Dr. Melillo: Well, I just define most human behavior in neurological terms. Because ultimately, all human behavior is a function of the brain. And even though it may not feel like it to us, it may feel like emotions are these kinds of things that we feel like we can’t control. They all are actually just networks in the brain. So resilience, to me, is really related to maturity and maturation and appropriate development of the brain.
When the brain is appropriately developed and integrated, especially the two hemispheres, we are resilient not only emotionally but physically, we’re healthier, and we can deal with whatever comes our way. So I think resilience is that.
It’s basically the ability to respond and react to anything in your environment or anything that happens to you, especially adversely and be able to be okay. And be able to adapt to it and be able to come back or be stronger after that. But to me, again, it has to do with the maturation and integration of the brain and the hemispheres.
Jodi: I love that. And before we started recording, you were talking about how kind of any imbalance happens in childhood but can be corrected throughout life. Can you talk about that a little bit and early childhood adverse events?
Dr. Melillo: Sure. My whole thing in the whole approach of the Melillo Method, which I’ve developed, is really what we call developmental functional neurology. Which means that almost everything that we see in adults’ health and especially mental health now—we know obviously whatever’s happening in your brain is affecting your body as well—really comes down to what happens in childhood, especially in the first six years.
The left brain and the right brain are really forming, developing, and initially creating their initial balance and integration. The right brain develops in the first three years and in the womb, and then the left brain develops the next three years.
And how that goes and how that integrates determines really the fate of the adult brain. If we develop imbalances early on in life, which is very common, those imbalances stay and usually get more pronounced as we grow, and this prevents integration and proper– and some areas of the brain stay immature.
And this is again the opposite of what I think resilience is. And what we see is that most of the mental health issues that we see in adults really we know now in psychology and psychiatry start in childhood. So it’s all about development of the brain. The good news is that, well, our brain is still developing until our 40s, at least.
So anything that comes out during that time could still be developmental, but we can also go back at any age and really fix the problem. So if there was a glitch or miscommunication, or functional imbalances that developed, we can go back at any point, and we can correct that. So there’s never a point where the brain can’t be changed.
There’s never a point where we can’t correct some of these developmental issues. And we can do it really relatively quickly, like within months, even if you’ve had this for decades. But we know like schizophrenia doesn’t show up until your 20s.
But yet we know that it really probably starts in the womb. And there was a really good study years ago showing that if you took siblings or identical twins, one who ended up with schizophrenia in their 20s and one who didn’t, and you can go back and look at early videotape of them, that even people that are untrained can pick out which one is going to get schizophrenia just by looking at their early milestones.
They couldn’t sit upright. They would topple over. They walked or moved in an awkward way. And so, very early on, we can see that these issues are happening. I believe that if we intervene at that point, those kids won’t ever end up with schizophrenia.
Jodi: I love that. You can prevent problems, and you can also unravel them. Before we get into kind of what causes problems, can you just for the layman kind of delineate the difference between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere and what areas of physical and mental or emotional function they control?
Dr. Melillo: Yeah, sure. And if you want to remember it, it’s always good to think about it in turns. The right brain develops first in the first three years. So just think about what happens in a baby’s brain in the womb and in the first three years. And then the next three years is really the left brain, and that kind of sets the foundation.
And it is the fact that the right brain is developing first and all of the things that are going on in the environment, including in the womb, that are really shaping the brain, the right hemisphere. And then when it switches, what’s happening from three to six is very different, like development of language. So the left hemisphere is generally about details. It’s all about looking at the small picture. It’s sequential. It’s logical. It’s linear. It’s linguistic.
So it’s about language. So verbal language of any kind is really a left-brain function. The left brain is about conscious learning and memorizing things, and remembering things. So what we look at in traditional academics, a lot of that math, science, remembering things, memorization, rote memorization, language-based skills, reading, writing, arithmetic. These are left-brain types of skills.
Left brain also governs what we call approach behavior. So it’s kind of get up and go. It’s motivational. It’s goal-directed and goal-oriented. It has what we call seeking behavior.
It gets a goal. It’s looking for a goal, and it’s reward reinforced, meaning that when we achieve a goal, we get a shot of dopamine, and it tells you keep on going. The left brain is also more motor-driven, and the left brain also activates the immune system.
So it actually makes the immune system more hyperactive or active. The right brain, which develops first, obviously in the womb we don’t have a lot of detailed sound coming in. So what happens is the baby– well, we know the baby can come out recognizing their parents’ voice. We also know they can react to tone of voice and emotionality of tone of voice.
So that is a right-brain function. We also know visually that the baby in the womb isn’t really seeing much. And then when they come out, they can’t really see much for the first six months to a year.
And so they see kind of blurry vision, but they have very heightened motion detection, movement, especially physical, biological movement, looking at the mother’s facial expression or being drawn to that. The right brain is about attachment. The right brain is about forming relationships and maintaining relationships.
It’s the social. It’s the emotional regular of the brain. It’s also what we call avoidance behavior of the brain. So it’s about being cautious. The left brain loves familiarity. It loves to do the same thing over and over. It’s naturally obsessive, compulsive, impulsive.
It likes patterns, and it’s good with pattern recognition, and it loves doing the same thing over and over. It hates to transition to something new. It doesn’t really care that much about people. It’s more about finding a goal—more isolated. The right brain is connected to the global world. It’s about the big picture. It’s about our big body. It’s about being connected to our body on a really basic primal level and really connecting to our emotions.
The right brain is intuitive, whereas the left brain is logical. The right brain is nonverbal communication. So understanding facial, emotional expression, gestures. And so, the right brain language forms first. The right brain is about novelty. The right brain is drawn to anything new that we’re learning or anything new because anything new could be potentially dangerous. And the right brain is about withdrawal behavior.
The left brain governs what we call positive emotions, which is really happiness, joy, curiosity, or surprise and anger, which is really a left brain. The only really pure left-brain emotion is anger. The right brain is really more about withdrawal.
So it’s more about fear, or we could say disgust so that we don’t eat anything that’s bad for us. And also guilt and shame, so it has a conscience. The left brain really doesn’t. The right brain can really do what the left brain can do. The left brain can’t do what the right brain does. The right brain is more artistic, creative, or new things, new ideas.
And so that’s kind of a rough idea of how they work. The right brain suppresses the immune system. So if we have a right-brain deficit, we have an overactive immune system. We get autoimmune disorders. I see kids with autism. They almost always end up having eczema early on, especially when dairy is introduced.
The right brain really also controls the autonomic system. Left brain is more what we call sympathetic fight or flight. The right brain is more parasympathetic, rest and digest.
So this is how this kind of works. And so we see that when we have deficits or imbalances. We don’t just affect behavior or cognition, or emotional regulation. We affect our whole body. We affect our autonomic system, our digestive system, our immune system.
And we see some kids that have left-brain deficits that may have dyslexia or language-based problems. They may also have a weak immune system. So they get chronic ear infections, and they’re sick all the time. On the other hand, we get kids with autism that are often referred to as Teflon kids. They never get sick, but they have a hyperactive immune system. And that’s why they may overreact with vaccines, or they may overreact when they’re sick, or they get food sensitivities or allergies or asthma or eczema very easily.
Jodi: That’s wonderful. Can you speak a little bit to what might contribute to these imbalances?
Dr. Melillo: Yes. Basically, there are a lot of environmental factors mostly that are superimposed on certain natural human traits. So in the vast majority of neural behavioral issues in kids or adults, there are no genetic mutations, contrary to what a lot of people believe.
We hear that they’re genetic. And they are genetic, but they’re what we call epigenetics, which means that environmental factors are altering gene expression. They’re not actually mutating or damaging genes. They’re just keeping them turned off when they should be turned on.
My third book, Autism: The Scientific Truth, is really a preconception program for parents that would come to me, and they wanted to know if there’s anything they could do to potentially prevent having a child with a disability. And so I put that book together to really let them understand what are the environmental factors that elevate the risk.
And in that book, I’ve listed about 50 different well-known, well-documented through science risk factors. You can’t say that something is absolutely going to cause autism or ADHD or that you’ve absolutely prevented it. All you can say is that we know that these factors elevate your risk. You could measure those factors, and by eliminating them, then you probably lower your risk of having a child with an issue.
But these are just general principles of being healthy in adults. And so what we know is there a lot of different factors. I believe the number one factor is an imbalance in the brain, especially in the mother. But in the mother or the father because this affects their autonomic system and their immune system.
And all of the factors that really affect it are really things like increased stress hormones. Again, things that increase inflammatory chemicals or cytokines in our body increase cortisol.
These are things that have tremendous impact on gene and gene expression when we go to conceive. These epigenetic factors, what they do is they– we talk about, as we go through our life, we have certain sins we create on our body. We drink. We smoke. We stay up too late. We do things that aren’t good for us.
And we develop methyl molecules. These methyl molecules have a tendency to attach to our genes and block those genes from being read so that those genes are shut off. We used to believe in the old days that during conception, that those methyl marks were wiped clean, and a baby started with a completely clean genetic slate.
We know now that’s not true. That there’s good evidence to show that those methyl marks can go up to at least 11 generations that we know of. And so, therefore, we can pass on sins from the adults to our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great, great, great-grandchildren.
But we also know that we can wipe those marks clean at any point by doing just healthy things for our body. By stimulating what’s called [inaudible] molecules. And by doing things that can get rid of those methyl molecules.
And so we can change that, and we can change gene expression and course of destiny. But there are factors that we know as well, things like pollution. We know organophosphates. We know different types of pesticides, plastics.
But most of the factors are lifestyle factors, things like obesity, diabetes, hypertension, hormone imbalances. Again, inflammatory chemicals in our body. These are factors that are the most common factors that elevate their risk of having a child with a disability. And those things are, again, completely modifiable by just changing your lifestyle.
Jodi: Yeah. Before we started recording, you were talking about how you have people fill out kind of an adverse childhood experience form to measure stress. And then, at the same time, a resiliency form because if their resilience is high, they don’t necessarily have the same impact. Can you speak to that a little bit, please?
Dr. Melillo: Yeah. Again, when you talk about resiliency and its actual clinical implications and practical implications, that’s how I look at it. And again, I look at it neurologically.
So I don’t know if people are familiar with what we call an ACEs score or an ACEs study, the adverse childhood experience study that was done really in the late 80s, 90s, but it’s one of the largest and one of the best studies ever done.
What they did was essentially, they looked at files of about 28,000 people. And they found that some people that didn’t really respond to treatment as they would expect and didn’t seem to have any other factors, they found the one thing that linked them together was they all had these things called adverse childhood experiences. And they defined them as these 10 experiences, things like physical, emotional neglect, abuse.
If there was a member of the family who was incarcerated, if there was divorce, if the father treated the mother aggressively physically, if there was substance abuse in the family. And what they found was really fascinating was they found that, first of all, in this 28,000 people that they looked at, which were college-educated people, that something like 70% had at least one of these experiences.
Well, what they found was that 12.5% had four or more. And if you had four or more, they found that your risk of having a whole number of host of chronic illnesses, physical and mental, were elevated anywhere from 400% to 1200%— things like suicidality, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, all the leading things that cause death. And really most shocking was that these people tended to die 20 years earlier on average.
So pretty significant. And when they looked at it, and they said, well, why is this? What are these adverse childhood experience actually doing? And what they found was they found it was what they called disrupted neurodevelopment or delayed neurodevelopment, which is exactly what I do. This is my research.
And so something in that adverse experience, what it did was it altered the brain development and created an imbalance in the brain that then created an imbalance in the immune and autonomic system, that led to all of these different illnesses and diseases and ultimately early death.
They found that the one thing that really protected, that was protective from people from this, was their resiliency score. So if they had a higher resiliency score, even if they had a higher ACEs score, they didn’t have the same risk factors, so that you could really judge someone’s response to ACEs.
So if ACEs and the impact of it was directly tied to disrupted neurodevelopment, to me, their resiliency score is a direct picture of their maturation and development of their brain. Which is how I told you I defined it from the beginning.
And so, when we see patients of every age, we always have them fill out the ACEs score, which is a simple questionnaire. And then we always have them fill out a resiliency score. And we can compare the two because we know if we have someone with a lot of ACEs that there’s a lot of work to do there.
And we know that if they have a good resiliency score, then their prognosis is going to be really good. But we know that we can change that because we can change their brain at any age. And that’s kind of the point.
So it’s really fascinating research, fascinating information. A real window that anybody can do and really look at what their potential risk factor is and why they’re developing things like diabetes and hypertension, and cancer. And again, it all comes back to the brain and brain development.
Jodi: No, that’s amazing. And it explains why siblings that have the same ACEs respond differently.
Dr. Melillo: Right. Yes. We’ve had that. We’ve had different people from the same family, and they had the same ACE score, but they have different resiliency scores. And so I think that really when I look at them neurologically, the one that has the higher resilience, has a healthier brain and nervous system and a more balanced brain than the one that didn’t.
Jodi: I haven’t seen the resiliency scale yet. What are some of the questions, and what are some of the things that you measure, so people are like, oh, I wonder what my resilience is? How would they know?
Dr. Melillo: I can get you a copy of the score. And it’s out there. You can Google it, resiliency score, or resilience scale. And people can Google it and probably find it for free online and download it and do it and take the test. And it gives you a score of it. Just like with ACEs, we know that four or more is significant.
And it’s really more, again, kind of the idea of how you handle different situations. How do you respond to different situations, basically? And different stressful situations, how did you respond to when you were younger? Things like that.
Jodi: And what you’re doing when you work with people, I’m assuming, is you’re assessing the imbalances and then helping to correct them. Can you speak a little bit to how you do that?
Dr. Melillo: Yeah. Well, it starts with a proper history and examination and really identifying, looking at them from a developmental perspective. One of the single most important things in my focus of research right now on my PhD project is really looking at something called primitive reflexes. And this has a lot to do with early developmental milestones.
Despite what many pediatricians say, early milestones matter a lot. And so, even if you’re delayed slightly, it matters. So when you roll over, when you crawl, how you crawl, when you stand up, when you walk, when you talk, how many words you say at what age, what are your social, emotional milestones? These are really important windows.
And when they’re off, we know that they indicate that there’s a developmental imbalance happening in the brain. And what we know is that we can intervene. Now, why do they miss milestones, or why do they move in an awkward way? It’s because they have these things called retained primitive reflexes.
Primitive reflexes are things we’re born with so that we can interact and move. Essentially, we are born with a basic operating system in our brain that can do almost everything. It can walk. It can talk. But the software’s there, but it doesn’t really mean anything until we actually interact with the world and calibrate it to the world.
So we have to interact with the world so that we start actually matching different situations, and our brain can match it. Like a parent, a child may start babbling and saying different words, baba, mama, dada. And then, all of a sudden, they go dada. And the father and the mother go, oh my God. They said, dada, daddy. This is daddy. And the baby software says, oh, wow, that just meant something.
And then it just generates these random sounds. And then again, mama. Oh, mama. And then the baby starts learning. Oh, okay. Wait, dada means that guy, and mama means that guy. But we have to first interact with the world before we can calibrate our brain. Otherwise, nothing happens, and we don’t learn anything.
When we’re born, we don’t have a motor cortex, really. And so, how do we move? We have to move to really initiate the growth and the development of the brain.
So we have these reflexes that come from the lower brainstem area that allow us to do things like root and suck so a baby can latch on. Grasping reflexes, orienting reflexes, startle responses, asymmetric and symmetric tonic neck reflexes that allow our body to move in a certain way, very basic simple way, but it gets us to start moving.
It gets us to start interacting. It gets to start getting the flow of sensory information back to our brain, which then turns on genes that allows our brain to grow. And our brain grows from the brainstem up, from the bottom up. And then the brain comes from the top down to regulate everything. And at the same time, we’re also integrating the right and the left side of the brain at the same time.
And so what we see is that these primitive reflexes allow us to do that. But then, after a year, they should go away. When a baby finally stands up, starts to walk at one year, and talk at one year, this old software system should be basically deleted, and it should be upgraded. And then, it should be periodically upgraded every time we get through a different developmental stage.
And what can happen is in many kids, in almost all kids with any developmental issues and most adults with health or mental health issues, these reflexes, that old software is never deleted. Their reflexes don’t go away. They’re retained, and they persist, and they interfere with some of the development. And basically, what they do is they kind of halt the development of the brain.
And so now one side of the brain that’s supposed to be developing during that time is kind of stopped. And now the other side kicks in too early and too aggressively. And then this is superimposed on natural traits. We’re all either more right-brain or left-brain dominant. It’s a little bit more complex than that, but essentially that’s like being right-handed or left-handed. And if you’re naturally left-brained, we see in the families, this is called an intellect trait.
We have families that are very intelligent, really good academically, professors, lawyers, engineers, mathematicians, scientists, and they are just naturally good at that. They all gravitate now towards mostly computer technology.
But if the right brain delays, and now the left brain kicks in too strong on someone that’s naturally left-brain dominant, you get this significant imbalance. And that’s what we see in almost everybody with autism and their parents and their families. And this is autism, ADHD, OCD, Tourette’s, tic, schizophrenia.
On the other hand, we get the right brain. These are what we call creative traits or creative– it’s a creative trait. And we see this is family of people that are all artists. They’re dancers, or they’re athletes, or they’re incredibly social people, and they naturally have this creativity.
And if there’s a delay during that development and this kicks in too strong, that’s what we see is dyslexia, learning disabilities, bipolar disorder, chronic depression, PTSD-type symptoms, those types of things.
So what we see is that there’s a natural trait, not a mutation, and most of the kids and most of the people that end up with these imbalances are the ones that are the most gifted in those areas.
They naturally have areas of their brain that are more strongly wired. And when someone’s talented or gifted in an area, what does it mean? It literally translates into certain areas, and certain networks are more tightly connected in certain people naturally than others.
And if they have that strength, but then they develop an imbalance, it becomes too strong. And any of the issues that we see is really a combination of overactivity in one area of the brain on one side. So like ADHD, attention deficit, the right brain controls attention. If we ever delay in right brain development, we have poor attention.
The left brain is motor and is impulsivity. And so we see hyperactivity of the left brain, and that’s motor hyperactivity. It can also be obsessive-compulsive disorder, and still, the symptoms are too much of the left, too little of the right. And that is the actual disorder. And when we create a balance, we literally can completely correct that disorder.
Jodi: That was so well articulated. I love that. So talk a little bit about how you create balance. First of all, you want to make sure you understand what is the strong part and what is the weak part, so you’re not over-strengthening the strong part. I know it’s very specific to each individual, but what kind of strategies help balance the brain?
Dr. Melillo: Yeah, so it depends on what area of the brain. And again, we want to look at– There’s motor part of the brain. There’s the autonomic part of the brain. There’s the immune part of the brain. There’s the cognitive part of the brain. There’s the emotional part of the brain. There’s the sensory systems. There’s vision. There’s audition. There’s smell. There’s taste. There’s proprioception.
So we look at all of those things individually, and we assess them. That’s why it’s called functional developmental neurology. We measure functions. And each area of the brain– I mean, actually, a guy named Brodmann years ago mapped out about 50 different areas of our brain that literally are structurally different and control different functions.
And we can literally look at each one of those areas. We do something called brain mapping, which is where we can literally, in our office, look at the brain in real-time. And we can look at these individual Brodmann areas on the right side or the left side.
And each one of them control different things. When we link a few of those together, those are what we call networks like the salience network or the default mode network. And we can look at these things in real-time. We can also assess the function that they’re responsible for.
If they’re responsible for a particular aspect of auditory processing function. Like the right brain processes low-frequency sound and prosody and emotional variation. And there’s a specific area in the brain that does that—41 and 42 are the hearing centers.
And then there’s 20, 21, and 22 that actually process these things, and different areas are responsible for processing emotion. And we can literally see that, okay, this person doesn’t respond to emotional variance. And that’s what we see in autism. They don’t pick up on it. They don’t hear it. They don’t generate it. They speak very little or no emotion.
And so then what we can do is we can target those areas to strengthen that. And everybody, with all those different areas, again, imagine 50 different areas, at least on both sides of the brain, that do different things. The combination in different people of deficits of areas of overactivity and underactivity, it’s completely unique, but we can assess that.
And then, we can put together a program that targets that using physical exercises or balance or sensory stimulation. Different colors activate different sides of the brain and different networks: different sounds, different types of music, different movements, head movements, balance-type stuff. And we can use lasers directly on the brain, but we have to remove the primitive reflexes first. And then, we have to stimulate the brain on one side to create this balance.
And we have to target those specific areas from both bottom-up therapies and what we call top-down therapies at the same time. And then we measure that until we know that we get that area of the brain to where it should be. To literally where it has the proper frequency, where it gets into a beta or alpha or gamma range. And we can see that the brain starts to integrate and link together. And that’s really the process of what we do.
Jodi: I love that. Basically, what you’re doing is you’re balancing the brain so that the resilience is enhanced.
Dr. Melillo: Exactly. I mean, resilience ultimately comes down to a balanced brain. The more balanced brain you have, the more healthy brain is, the healthier your body is. And the more resilient you are, the less likely you are to get heart disease or cancer or diabetes, or any of those issues.
So ultimately, our focus is to remove anything that affected development of the brain and then to create proper balance and integration between different networks. It’s different on each person. But we can look at it in a measurable way. And then, because the brain affects the body, we have to address diet and nutrition.
If you have an overactive immune system, you may have a gluten sensitivity or a dairy sensitivity. You have a leaky gut because the brain isn’t regulating the gut. Or food sensitivities, you first have to have an imbalance in the brain before you’re going to get a food sensitivity.
Before you have a leaky gut, persistently, you already have an imbalance in your brain. So it’s not just about healing the gut that’s important, but if you don’t fix the brain– and once you do fix the brain, then you don’t have to do anything for the gut anymore, other than eat a healthy, balanced diet, or take some simple vitamins.
But you have to address what’s going on in the body as well. So we do that as well, of course, and we try to get people lead a healthier lifestyle since it’s lifestyle choices that lead to most of these issues. But when your brain is working better, you make better lifestyle choices.
Jodi: Exactly. No, and I did a whole Parasympathetic Summit. When you’re in the sympathetic branch of the nervous system, certain signals don’t get sent. This is amazing. Is there anything related to resilience and brain health that we haven’t touched on that you’d like to share?
Dr. Melillo: Well, one of the things you just mentioned was that– I really think also that translates into balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic. The left brain is sympathetic. The right brain is more parasympathetic. So if you have a right-brain deficit, you automatically have a low parasympathetic system, and you can do all the things you want to stimulate the vagal system.
But if you don’t have the brain regulating it, then it’s not really going to work, or it’s not going to last. And so we could look at resilience also could be equated to really good parasympathetic tone because we know that ACEs scores is related to a high sympathetic tone and low parasympathetic. So building that right brain is also building our parasympathetic vagal system. So it’s all related to that. Very important.
Jodi: I love this. And since there is no one-size-fits-all, and I’m sure a lot of listeners for themselves, for their children, for their relatives are going to want to learn more, can you share how people can get in touch with you and work with you?
Dr. Melillo: I have my website, drrobertmelillo.com. We have a great course. I mean, over the past several years, the explosion for my work on the Melillo Method all over the world has really exploded. So I’m training doctors and physicians, and therapists. I’ve already trained over 10,000, and there’s a certification fellowship process.
So, anybody that’s interested in doing that course, you can get it online. You can take it at any time. We’re also teaching live. And that course is always changing. It always advances—the most cutting-edge stuff. I believe it’s the most cutting-edge model in healthcare today for anything.
And on there also, they can access my books. I have seven best-selling books. Disconnected Kids is the best-selling book. I think it’s translated to 13 or 14 languages. I had a neurologist in Turkey that loved my work and actually translated the book. And so it just came out in Turkish over the last couple of weeks.
Jodi: Wow. Congratulations.
Dr. Melillo: Yeah. I have a pediatrician in Dubai right now that is also really passionate about my work [inaudible] into Arabic. So we have the books available that people can get. And also, we have some online courses and products for adults with ADHD or other imbalances that they can do online.
I have a practice, two practices in New York City. One in New York City. One in Long Island. And you can, again, reach me through the website drrobertmelillo.com. And I’m also really active on Instagram. And I show a lot of videos and educational videos, and that’s @DrRobMelillo and then obviously Facebook.
Jodi: Well, this was a great interview. Thank you for sharing so much. You really unpacked it in a very accessible way. So thank you for your time.
Dr. Melillo: My pleasure. Thank you.
