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Global challenges are complex and must be tackled in a holistic manner. Understanding and addressing them requires collaboration across disciplines, often uniting the humanities and social and natural sciences, to ask better questions and identify practical and revolutionary solutions. Universities can be excellent vehicles for transformational change as they educate the next generation of civically-motivated thinkers to create meaningful action and impact. Too often systemic, artificial barriers exist within these institutions that prevent meaningful transdisciplinary collaboration from succeeding. We recommend that universities identify grand challenges and foster a culture of cross-department collaboration with appropriate internal and external resources to enable broader impacts. Together, funders and institutional policymakers play a critical strategic role in fostering civic scientists and transdisciplinary researchers to solve multifaceted global problems.