Shelby Bradford, PhD

Shelby Bradford, PhD

Assistant editor at Labx Media Group

Shelby is an Assistant Editor at The Scientist. She earned her PhD in immunology and microbial pathogenesis from West Virginia University, where she studied neonatal responses to vaccination. She completed an AAAS Mass Media Fellowship at StateImpact Pennsylvania, and her writing has also appeared in Massive Science. Shelby participated in the 2023 flagship ComSciCon and volunteered with science outreach programs and Carnegie Science Center during graduate school. 

Articles by Shelby Bradford, PhD

Image of a cutout silhouette of a person’s profile with six coffee beans clustered in their head. There are cutout shapes of two lightning bolts and an exclamation point above their head.

How Does Caffeine Wake People Up?

Illustration depicting how environmental changes affect the immune system. On the left, cold temperatures slow the immune system down, and cells are less active. On the right, warm weather promotes immune system activity.

Why Does the Immune System Struggle When the Weather Changes?

Illustration of a transparent human torso with the respiratory tract and alveoli highlighted in light orange to indicate asthma.

Obesity-Associated Asthma Has a Dietary Source

Illustration showing several people’s arms raised and holding signs with faces that either depict neutral yellow faces, unhappy red faces, or happy green faces. This image is emphasizing mixed reactions to an announcement.

NIH’s Priorities Announcement Receives Mixed Responses from Researchers

Cartoon of eight people standing in front of three pages of paper with text indicated by grey lines holding up a magnifying glass to the middle one on a light blue background. The image is a representation of peer review.

Transparent Peer Review: A New Era for Scientific Publishing

3D illustration of spherical blue viruses with receptors sticking out surrounded by green, Y-shaped antibodies.

A Broadly Protective HIV Vaccine Shows Promising Results in Monkeys

3D illustration of a rod-shaped bacteria accumulating PFAS compounds intracellularly.

Some Gut Microbes Sequester PFAS Internally

3D illustration of fat cells surrounding a transparent cell with a red membrane and growing fat stores in its center. This is a representation of breast tumor using nearby adipocytes as a source of energy to proliferate.

Aggressive Breast Cancers Steal Energy from Nearby Fat Cells

Photograph of an up-close shot of a person’s face to focus on their eye, which is looking upward.

Electric Bursts Reshape the Cornea to Improve Eyesight Without LASIK

3D illustration of a neuron with the cell body highlighted in pink to represent damage from an amyloid β plaque on its axons to the left. An enlarged plaque bundle is shown in the top left corner of the image, with the fibrils highlighted in pink and yellow.

Amyloid Beta Impairs Microglia Function in Alzheimer’s Disease

3D illustration of a transparent human abdomen with the large and small intestine visible. The small intestine appears to have a light emanating from within it and is full of yellow, blue, and pink microbes. This image is highlighting the role of the gut microbiome in chronic pain.

Gut Microbes Cause Fibromyalgia-Like Symptoms in Mice

3D illustration of six paper airplanes flying in swirls, depicted by white dashed lines, on the left, and one red airplane flying straight across to the right on a blue background, used here as an indicator for leadership in academia.

An Academic’s Guide to Leadership in the Lab

Image of a woman with her hands across her stomach. She has a look of discomfort on her face. There is a blown up image of her stomach next to her and it has colorful butterflies and gut bacteria all swarming within the gut.
November 2025, Issue 1

Why Do We Feel Butterflies in the Stomach?

These fluttering sensations are the brain’s reaction to certain emotions, which can be amplified or soothed by the gut’s own “bugs".

View this Issue

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Olga Anczukow and Ryan Englander discuss how transcriptome splicing affects immune system function in lung cancer.

Long-Read RNA Sequencing Reveals a Regulatory Role for Splicing in Immunotherapy Responses

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Research Roundtable: The Evolving World of Spatial Biology

Research Roundtable: The Evolving World of Spatial Biology

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Exploring the State of the Art in Gene Editing Techniques

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Simplifying Early Alzheimer’s Disease Diagnosis with Blood Testing

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