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 serves on the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, and she participated in the European Union Visitors Programme for 2011.

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 served as the Science Advisor of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism from April 2009 until the Commission ended in February 2010. She has testified before Congress about the safety and security of high-containment biological laboratories in the United States and served on several task forces related to laboratory security, including a 2008 Defense Science Board task force 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). 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).

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.