Overview of OBSSR's Strategic Vision at NIH The vision of OBSSR, as articulated in the strategic prospectus, is to mobilize the biomedical, behavioral, social, and population science research communities as partners to solve the most pressing health challenges faced by society.1 Such a transdisciplinary approach is called for because there is increasing awareness that the most daunting and intractable problems in public health are so because of their complexity, and that the failure to appreciate and adequately address this complexity is thwarting attempts to tackle these problems.21 Indeed, the health and well-being of the whole population may be best conceptualized as a “systems” problem, occurring on a continuum over the human lifespan as well as across a variety of levels of analysis, ranging from the cellular and molecular to individual and interpersonal behaviors, to the community and society and to macro-socioeconomic and global levels (Figure 1).22The OBSSR at NIH has historically embraced a biopsychosocial perspective on the causes and correlates of health and illness.23,24 Extending the biopsychosocial model, Glass and McAtee20 provide an even stronger rationale for OBSSR's taking an interdisicplinary and systems science perspective to improve understanding of the forces that determine optimal health promotion and prevention, reduced disease burden, and improved chronic disease management across the human lifespan and across generations. Consistent with the Glass and McAtee model of problem conceptualization,20 the OBSSR staff recognize that the health problems of the 21st Century are complex. Solving these problems not only demands a movement from interdisciplinarity to transdisciplinarity synthesis, but also dictates the methods needed for addressing them.25,26 OBSSR's emphasis on systems science reflects this awareness.