The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is engaged in several activities relevant to the theme of this journal issue, “Implementation of obesity and diabetes interventions”. This column includes brief summaries of two new strategic plans for research that were released by the NIH in early 2011. Both strategic plans include research priorities relevant to translational behavioral medicine. The NIH supports a wide range of obesity and diabetes research and so only a few examples are covered in this column. The URLs for the full strategic plans are given below. …