This editorial was originally published in Science Advances. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adp7473. Copyright © 2024 the Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY- NC). ; The imperative for rigorous and ground-breaking social science and interdisciplinary research becomes clearer every day. COVID-19 made ever more manifest the importance of understanding the social processes and inequalities involved in health and disease, not just the technical capacity to create, test, and deliver treatments and vaccines. Deeply understanding the processes involved in the spread of disinformation and misinformation as well as scientifically vetted ways to counter these scourges is essential for maintaining at least shreds of a shared social and political reality. Identifying with precision the direct and collateral consequences of public policies and, more generally, better understanding issues of the day (e.g., abortion access) by rigorously analyzing the scope and consequences of different forms of inequality, from poverty to racial/ethnic inequalities, to gender inequalities (including inside of the academy), among other inequalities, are crucial to truly and deeply understanding, and improving, our world. See Box 1 for published papers related to these areas.