UC Merced Mission priorities include discovery of new knowledge and cross-disciplinary inquiry. The best strategic expression of these core values within biology is Quantitative and Systems Biology (QSB). QSB is well-poised to convert UC Merced investments in interdisciplinary science into biological advances. QSB must revamp from an umbrella group for the life sciences with a renewed and sharpened mission to accelerate biological discovery through innovation. In its core values, QSB champions the unity of biology, innovation and interdisciplinary science and engineering, quantitative approaches, and integration of models and data to explain and predict biological phenomena, with a focus on information, organization, mechanisms, dynamics and emergent phenomena in living systems. QSB’s grand challenge is to fully explain and predict the organization and dynamics of living systems. To get there by 2020, QSB must differentiate its membership, expand transdisciplinary core faculty, and cultivate extramural partnerships and investments to create a Quantitative and Systems Biology Institute (QSBI) and a Department of Quantitative and Systems Biology that offers a unique brand of quantitative and interdisciplinary biology research and education focused on information, organization, dynamics and emergent phenomena in living systems, and the synthesis of data in integrated models to explain and predict those phenomena.