Shelby Bradford, PhD

Shelby Bradford, PhD

Assistant editor at The Scientist

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

Photograph of a swarm of mosquitoes, a disease vector, near a green bush with the rest of the background blurred.

Bacteria-Treated Insects Could Help Halt Disease Spread

“Magic mushrooms”, containing psilocybin, are shown beside and inside of a daily pill container, indicating the potential for these compounds to be used as medicines.

Psilocybin Treats Chronic Pain and Depression in Mice

Photograph of a CDBN participant using an insect net to collect insects from a field with wildflowers and other plants.

Citizens Barcode Bugs to Improve Genetic Databases

3D illustration of a foot covered in pins with round red balls on the end. This depicts the sensation of pins and needles that is created when a limb is cut off from oxygen and then the nerves overreact.

What Causes the Pins and Needles Sensation?

Fluorescent image of a mouse cerebellum with Purkinje cells expressing green fluorescent protein. Where cells have died, there are gaps organized into stripes across the tissue.

Aging Brains Show Stripes of Cell Death

Illustration of a ring of circles drawn so that their outer edges are darker blue-black than their inner sides. This creates an optical illusion that the space in the center is a brighter white than the white background outside the circle ring.

How the Brain Sees Illusions

Photograph of tan rock with two diagonal veins of lighter rock on either side. In the tan rock are several small, irregular spots of sand-colored rock ringed with dark bluish-greenish rock. These spots’ chemical composition was studied and found to contain minerals that, given Mars’s expected environment billions of years ago, could have been produced by microbes.

Martian Minerals Point to Possible Signs of Past Life, Researchers Say

A composite image showing a reconstruction of a fraction of the neurons in the one cubic millimeter studied in the MICrONS project. Each neuron is assigned a random color, and some of them have been edited to appear to glow to represent neuronal activity.

A Map of the Impossible: MICrONS Delivers AI and Neuroscience Advances

Illustration of 3D protein elements. Metallic purple and green alpha coils and loops are present in the image.

Low-Complexity Domains of Proteins Work Honored with Lasker Award

An illustration depicting the mechanism of the Crunch cell targeting system developed by researchers at Kyoto University. A blue silhouette of a person stands on the left. On the right is a magnified image of inside the body, where purple malignant cells have yellow proteins on their surface. A green adaptor protein depicted as being attracted to the yellow proteins is flying to the cells, while an orange phagocyte is attached to the adaptor protein.

An Engineered Protein Helps Phagocytes Gobble Up Diseased Cells

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?

Image of a man in a laboratory looking frustrated with his failed experiment.
February 2026

A Stubborn Gene, a Failed Experiment, and a New Path

When experiments refuse to cooperate, you try again and again. For Rafael Najmanovich, the setbacks ultimately pushed him in a new direction.

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