Apelon congratulates Betsy Humphreys on her appointment as Acting Director of the National Library of Medicine. Betsy has been a leader in interoperability and in advancing the science and the adoption of controlled vocabulary throughout my informatics career. When Apelon (in the person of our predecessor Lexical Technology) got involved in the initial efforts leading to the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), Betsy was a firm hand on the wheel, keeping the project grounded in practical reality rather than allowing some of the more “novel” ideas to drive the project back into the bowels of a university. Today, working not only inside NLM but also on the national and international stage, she continues to advocate for an information ecosystem that makes sense for patients and providers.