Verbatim transcript of Marco Cavaglià's welcome speech.

"Thank you.

I will use this gavel in the spirit of partnership, not partisanship, and look forward to working with you on behalf of the physics community.

In this workshop, we may belong to different theories: Loop quantum gravity, string theory, noncommutative geometry... But we serve one purpose: The quantization of the gravitational field.

And today, I thank my colleagues and our forefathers, Newton and Einstein, Feynman and Dirac. They have brought us closer to the ideal of quantizing gravity.

For all of America's physicists, the workshop will be in order."