Gigi Kwik Gronvall is a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and a Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is an immunologist by training.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, she led the Center’s ongoing efforts to track the development and marketing of molecular and antigen tests and serology tests, as well as the development of national strategies for COVID-19 serology (antibody) tests and SARS-CoV-2 serosurveys in the United States. She leads work on improving indoor air quality to reduce pathogen transmission, including guidance for K-12 schools, and is a public health advisor to the Baltimore City Public School system. She also has written about the scientific response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the contested origin of SARS-CoV-2, and the implications for national and international security.
Dr. Gronvall is the author of Synthetic Biology: Safety, Security, and Promise. In the book, she describes what can be done to minimize technical and social risks and maximize the benefits of synthetic biology, focusing on biosecurity, biosafety, ethics, and US national competitiveness—important sectors of national security. Dr. Gronvall is also the author of Preparing for Bioterrorism: The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Leadership in Biosecurity. Through her description of major grants that represented the foundation’s investments in civilian preparedness, public health law, law enforcement, air filtering in buildings, influenza preparedness, and business preparedness, she constructed, for a nontechnical audience, a chronicle of early gains in US efforts to confront the threat of bioterrorism.
