Dr. Gronvall is a Senior Associate at the Center for Biosecurity of UPMC and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. She is an immunologist by training. She is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and also serves on the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility. Dr. Gronvall’s work addresses the role of scientists in biodefense—how they can diminish the threat of biological weapons and how they can contribute to an effective technical response against a biological weapon or a natural epidemic. Dr. Gronvall has testified before Congress about the safety and security of high-containment biological laboratories in the United States. She has served as the Science Advisor of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism and on several task forces related to laboratory security including a 2008 Defense Science Board task force on the biological safety, security, and personnel reliability of the Department of Defense’s biological laboratories, and a 2008 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panel charged with providing technical input on the risk of operating Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory (NEIDL). She also served on an Alliance for Biosecurity working group that focused on how to implement the FDA’s Animal Efficacy Rule for licensing new biodefense countermeasures. Dr. Gronvall has investigated and presented policy recommendations on the governance of science to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in Geneva, Switzerland (2003, 2005, and 2006). In 2005, she was the principal organizer of the International Conference on Biosafety and Biorisks, an international event convened in collaboration with the World Health Organization, in Lyon, France. Attendees discussed how scientists can respond to challenges presented by SARS, influenza, and other major epidemic threats; how scientists should communicate their findings in a crisis; and how best to improve international cooperation prior to and during future epidemics. Dr. Gronvall is an Associate Editor of the quarterly journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science. She is a founding member of the Center for Biosecurity of UPMC and, prior to joining the faculty in 2003, worked at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, which she joined in 2001. From 2000-2001 she was a National Research Council Postdoctoral Associate at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Dr. Gronvall received a BS in Biology from Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1993. She subsequently worked as a protein chemist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and received a PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2000 for work on T cell receptor/MHC I interactions. |