Gigi Kwik Gronvall, PhD & Richard Bruns, PhD - Johns Hopkins Model State Indoor Air Quality Act

Good Day and welcome to IAQ Radio+ episode 715 this week we welcome Dr. Gigi Kwik Gronvall, and Dr. Richard Bruns to discuss the recently developed Model State Indoor Air Quality Act.

Gigi Kwik Gronvall, PhD

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.

Dr. Gronvall is a member of the Department of State’s International Security Advisory Board, which provides advice about arms control, disarmament, nonproliferation, and national security aspects of emerging technologies. She is a member of the Novel and Exceptional Technology and Research Advisory Committee (NExTRAC), which provides recommendations to the Director of the National Institutes of Health and is a public forum for the discussion of the scientific, safety, and ethical issues associated with emerging biotechnologies. As of 2023, she is a member of the National Academies’ Forum on Microbial Threats.

From 2010 to 2020, Dr. Gronvall was a member of the Threat Reduction Advisory Committee, which provided the Secretary of Defense with independent advice and recommendations on reducing the risk to the United States, its military forces, and its allies and partners posed by nuclear, biological, chemical, and conventional threats. During 2014-2015, she led a preparatory group that examined the US government response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa as a case study for the Department of Defense’s strategic role in health security and made recommendations for future Department of Defense actions in response to disease outbreaks. She served as the Science Advisor for 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 and pathogen security. Dr. Gronvall has investigated and presented policy recommendations on the governance of science to the Biological Weapons Convention in Geneva, Switzerland.

In addition to being a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Dr. Gronvall is an Associate Editor of the journal Health Security (formerly Biosecurity and Bioterrorism). She is a founding member of the Center. Prior to joining the faculty, she worked at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. She was a National Research Council Postdoctoral Associate at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland.

Dr. Gronvall received a PhD from Johns Hopkins University for work on T-cell receptor/MHC I interactions and worked as a protein chemist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. She received a BS in biology from Indiana University, Bloomington.

Richard Bruns, PhD

• PhD Clemson University 2012
• MS Clemson University 2009
• BS Western Carolina University 2004

Particular research interests are using cost-benefit analysis to make the world’s preparations for pandemics and emerging biological risks as effective as possible; and expanding the use of QALYs to better measure a variety of life states and social conditions, so that cost-benefit analysis can include and properly account for all expected side effects of public policies.

Previously, Richard was a Senior Economist at the Food and Drug Administration, doing cost-benefit modeling of many FDA regulations and actions, including the Intentional Adulteration rule designed to harden food production facilities against terrorist attacks, the PHO GRAS determination aka ‘trans fat ban’, and a variety of other rules relating to food and medical devices. Richard also did preliminary modeling on FDA’s upcoming Nicotine Product Standard, a de facto ban on cigarettes that would cause many significant effects on public health and safety, as well as research to quantify and monetize the marginal per-unit effects of a variety of food contaminants, such as mycological toxins and arsenic in rice.