The Environmental Health Matters Initiative (EHMI) of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) was established by the three presidents as a mechanism for a transformational cross-institutional approach to enable challenges to be informed—rapidly if needed—by insights from a broad range of applicable scientific disciplines and sectors spanning academia, government, foundations, businesses, and nongovernmental organizations. The EHMI reaches across the three National Academies to provide a venue for bringing transdisciplinary and cross-sector thinking to environmental health issues that are urgent, on the horizon, or recalcitrant in nature. This paper describes how EHMI approached the critical and extremely vexing problem of the airborne transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) as the pandemic reached the six-month mark in the United States.