Public Health Professor Gigi Kwik Gronvall moonlights in the Marching Ravens band

Welcome to the first installment of My Other Life, a new At Work series that lets us get to know our Johns Hopkins colleagues better. Do you or one of you co-workers have a personal passion that would make a good story? Let us know at hubatwork@jhu.edu.

When we caught up with Gigi Kwik Gronvall, she was just back from an international vaccine conference in Lisbon, Portugal. She had been invited to speak about her work as a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and as a professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Gronvall, now in her 10th year at Hopkins, is an immunologist by training. She studies how to prevent future deliberate or natural pandemics, and the policies governing virology research. "I work to develop policies so scientists can respond to disease emergencies and help us prevent them," she says. Her current focus is on the quality of indoor air and how it can diminish the need for medical countermeasures to reduce transmission of diseases.

But during football season, you will find Gronvall in quite a different role: clad in a purple and black uniform playing the baritone in the Marching Ravens band at the football team's home games. One of only two marching bands in the NFL, the Baltimore band dates back 75 years to its origins as the Baltimore Colts' Band.

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Today, there are more than 150 musicians plus equipment crew in the Marching Ravens. The players include college students, lawyers, nurses, and people working in all sorts of other professions. "A lot of them are music educators, but then there are people like me whose day job has nothing to do with music. It's just a cool thing that they do," Gronvall says. As far as she knows, she's the first Hopkins professor to be part of the band. "But hopefully I'm not the last."

It's not so far-fetched that she would be drawn to playing in a marching band. She grew up playing piano and viola, played trumpet in high school, was in a garage band, and started college as a piano major before she "fell in love with biology" and decided to be a scientist. She wanted to be in her college band, but the competition at Indiana University, Bloomington, was steep. "There was no way I could have made the audition as a trumpet player—there were so many of them!—so I asked what instruments they needed and ended up learning to play the euphonium," Gronvall says. She describes the 14-pound brass instrument as "like a small tuba." The marching band version of the euphonium is called a baritone; there are slight differences in the instruments' sound and shape of the tubing.

"So fast-forward a couple of decades, and the first Ravens game I went to, I saw that they had a band," Gronvall says, "and it just kind of stayed in my head." When she came across the audition flyer soon after, it seemed meant to be. She rented a euphonium, practiced, tried out, and made it into the Marching Ravens. That was five years ago. "I think I'll do it as long as I can," she says. "We audition every year, so you have to keep making the decision to do it."

In fact, it was a conscious decision on Gronvall's part to choose a leisure-time pursuit that's vastly different from her career. She described her job—especially during the height of the pandemic, when she was doing vaccine outreach and media appearances and was a public health adviser to the Baltimore City Public Schools system—as "a lot of getting people to do things that they don't really want to do." In contrast, playing in the Marching Ravens is "just pure fun," she says. "It's a real crowd-pleaser, and it's also great to do something that is such a different thing [from your day job] that you have to just turn that part of your brain off. You have to be present."

Gronvall notes that the Marching Ravens took the COVID risks seriously. They practiced outside with covers on the wind instruments, and band members were required to be vaccinated. "I was so, so busy during COVID, it was a nice break."

If you're wondering how an internationally renowned immunologist—who also happens to be the mother of two teenage sons—has time to play in a marching band, Gronvall says the musicians' schedule is actually quite manageable. The band has just one practice a week, on Wednesday nights at the Under Armour Performance Center in Owings Mills, and then plays at the Ravens home games. "The home game days are long days for sure, but it's very doable," she says. For anyone who does not want to shell out for Ravens tickets but would like to hear the band, the Marching Ravens put on a free concert at Camden Yards before every home game, about an hour and a half before kickoff, before marching into M&T Bank Stadium.

The band has more than 500 songs in its repertoire—everything from "Rhapsody in Blue" to pop hits, Gronvall says. Her favorites are those where the baritones get the melody, which is not every song. "We did a Motown show this year. That's a lot of fun and sounds great. The caliber of musicians is really high." The band members can bring their music onto the field, so they don't have to memorize it. This year they have an app that highlights each musician's spot in the arrangement, making it even easier.

"It's a lot of fun," Gronvall reiterates. "It's great to be there. The energy is amazing. Of course, it's a lot more fun when we win."