Gnuradi control of the dw1000 chipset

can anyone provide guidance/pointers on connecting dw1000 to gnuradio for programming/control of the radio? is this even possible?

Programming and control is done via writing to registers from one of the provided communication busses. The DW 1000 User Manual contains all of the information you need for configuring the device. The Arduino DW1000 implementation by thotro in the DW1000.cpp file has examples that you can look at.