In welcoming the virtual group, co-organizer Sam Scarpino, an assistant professor in network science at Northwestern University and former SFI post-doc, noted one of the reasons for the gathering was: "Santa Fe is a very special place for meetings like this. Since the early 1980s, it has been a hub of complexity science gathering researchers across the disciplines to tackle some of the world's most challenging problems, one of which is pandemics; pandemics both from the sense of trying to understand their ecology, their evolution, their population dynamics, their epidemiology, but also to understand the feedback on our economies, on our global societies, on our mental and physical well being."