Sylvie Naar, PhD, Editor

According to the Institute of Medicine, the first stage of translational research (T1) focuses on “the transfer of new understandings of disease mechanisms gained in the laboratory into the development of new methods for diagnosis, therapy, and prevention and their first testing in humans.” T1 research in which “bench” findings are applied to the “bedside” is less common in the behavioral arena. Thus, advances in our understanding of fundamental human processes, such as motivation, emotion, cognition, self-regulation, communication, stress, and social networks, are not being optimally applied to our most pressing behavioral health problems. This issue focuses on promising behavioral treatments for pediatric obesity “in the pipeline” that have been translated from basic behavioral science and are the process of refinement and proof of concept testing. In this issue, Czajkowski and colleagues describe the ORBIT model for behavioral intervention development, and the first eight articles in this issue describe studies that address designing and preliminary testing of new interventions per the ORBIT model. The last article (Resnicow and colleagues) describes new directions in the implementation of an evidence-based practice in primary care settings. We thank the authors for their commitment to the dissemination of promising strategies to curb the obesity epidemic.