In its report, "Beyond Health Care: New Directions to a Healthier America" (April 2009), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Commission to Build a Healthier America published recommendations for improving the health and longevity of U.S. citizens. These recommendations go beyond the traditional health-care system to include homes, communities, schools, and workplaces and suggest making academic research on social inequalities more accessible to policy-makers. They also encourage working in a nonpartisan fashion to create sustainable, relevant, and flexible action plans. This panel will feature reactions to these recommendations from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: community-based participatory research, health policy, and systems science. After an overview of the recommendations, panel members will provide evidence for the recommendations outlined in this report, provide rationales for the breadth and nature of the recommendations, and make the case for invoking public-private partnerships in this endeavor. The goal is to inspire audience members to follow through on the recommendations and direct their research efforts at some of the pressing upstream issues (i.e., behavioral and social determinants of health).