The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will convene an ad hoc planning committee to review multi-disciplinary collaboration and scientific advances in the National Science Foundation’s Understanding the Rules of Life (URoL) Big Idea program. The planning committee will develop a series of brief workshops to:

• Discuss individual and collective scientific advancements toward achieving the vision of URoL, including understanding the rules of life function and the ability to predict changes in biological systems;
• Understand the contributions of disciplinary convergence in enabling or driving the scientific advances;
• Determine how research groups incorporated multi-disciplinary, systems-level approaches into their projects;
• Identify the broader implications of the scientific advances and research ecosystem (e.g., multi-disciplinary research) from research funded by the URoL program to address highly complex, interconnecting systems (e.g., the biosphere) and discuss the future of life-science research and education;
• Explore future societal needs and scientific questions that may be addressed by the achievements from the URoL (i.e., identify opportunities for exploration);
• Highlight rules of life that are generalizable across fields and scales.

The National Academies will summarize the outcomes of the discussions in a staff-prepared Proceedings. An infographic will be prepared following publication of the Proceedings.