Gigi Gronvall

Biography

Dr. Gigi Kwik Gronvall is a Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. She is an immunologist by training.

Her work focuses on minimizing the technical and social risks of the life sciences while advancing biosecurity, biosafety, ethics, and the bioeconomy. She has recently served on the National Academies’ Committee “Assessing and Navigating Biosecurity Concerns and Benefits of Artificial Intelligence Use in the Life Sciences” and she is a member of the NASEM Forum on Microbial Threats.

She leads work on improving indoor air quality to reduce pathogen transmission, and was a public health advisor to the Baltimore City Public School system for diagnostic testing during the acute days of the COVID-19 pandemic. She has written about the contested origin of SARS-CoV-2 and the implications for national and international security. She is the author of Synthetic Biology: Safety, Security, and Promise (2016) and Preparing for Bioterrorism: The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Leadership in Biosecurity (2012). Her forthcoming book, Our Biological Future will be published in 2026 by Johns Hopkins University Press.