Scientia, Volume 12 (2021)

Since its establishment in 2009, *Scientia* has been an inclusive journal community dedicated to supporting and celebrating the scientific research of undergraduate students at Notre Dame. The students and faculty advisors of our journal work together to provide a voice for emerging scientists of all types, and we believe that students should have the opportunity to professionally engage in scientific publishing and editing. We welcome submissions of student research in any discipline in the College of Science and seek to provide equal representation of student contributions to biology, chemistry, health, physics, and mathematics. We empower students to pursue their scientific goals not only through our annual publication of undergraduate research, but also through editorial board positions in the recruitment, editing, writing, and design process of our journal. This fall, because of the increasing student eagerness to become involved in our journal, we applied for and were awarded club status through the Student Activities Office at the University of Notre Dame. This new status as an official student organization will enable *Scientia* to increase our visibility on campus and provide new opportunities for underclassmen to engage in the scientific writing community beyond journal publication, such as grant-writing workshops, science journalism career panels, and academic writing training. We also became one of the founding members of the National Undergraduate Consortium on Scientific Journalism, collaborating with undergraduate research journals across the nation to organize its first annual conference. We hope that this ongoing partnership will continue into the future for years to come. This year, *Scientia* also faced the unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and its resultant effects on campus activities. We are exceptionally grateful for the adaptability of our staff, faculty, and guests who made this transition possible and supported our hybrid “Talk Science” seminars the past two semesters. We would particularly like to thank the editorial team for their flexibility and support in the publication process. We chose to focus portions of this issue on current research at Notre Dame related to COVID-19, including news features about epidemiological modeling in the lab of Dr. Alex Perkins and cytokine storm research by Ph.D. candidate Christina Oh. We are so excited to see how *Scientia* will grow and what the new leadership will accomplish in the upcoming years, and we are exceptionally confident in passing the roles of Editors-in-Chief to Andrew Langford and Abigail Abikoye. They have shown an outstanding commitment to the success of our journal, and we look forward to what they and our excellent editorial team will accomplish for *Scientia* in the 2021–2022 academic year. *Scientia*, we will miss you! In Notre Dame, Aidan Crowley & Lauren English Editors-in-Chief