Gigi Kwik Gronvall, A&S '00 (PhD), is an immunologist by training. As a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and a professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Gronvall studies how to prevent future deliberate or natural pandemics, and the policies governing virology research. Her current research focus: improving indoor air quality 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 Baltimore's 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' Marching Band.
Today, there are more than 150 musicians plus equipment crew in the Marching Ravens. The players include college students, lawyers, nurses, and people in all sorts of professions. "A lot of them are music educators, but then there are people like me whose day job has nothing to do with music," 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. Gronvall grew up playing piano, viola, and later the trumpet; 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 the shape of their 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.
