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Dr. Bradford has been actively engaged in medical research for over three decades.
She received her Master's and Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology in the
experimental analysis of behavior. After matriculation, she accepted a Postdoctoral
Fellowship at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry,
and was asked to join the faculty.
Dr. Bradford joined the pharmaceutical industry in northern Europe in the early 1980's,
where she was first CNS Section Head in the Department of Pharmacology and later joined
the Clinical Division as Senior Clinical Director. During her tenure in the industry,
she spent almost 15 years in discovery and development of drugs for psychiatric indications.
During this time, she began developing courses in training psychiatrists and primary
care givers in the conduct of clinical research. Dr. Bradford received a Diploma in
Pharmaceutical Medicine from the University of Leiden School of Medicine while in
Europe.
Dr. Bradford joined Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM) in 1997. She is Professor of
Clinical Psychiatry, the Director of the Minority Mental Health Research Program,
the research division of the Department of Psychiatry, and holds a secondary appointment
in the Department of Medicine. Dr. Bradford has maintained her interests and dedication
to formal course work and mentoring of clinicians who want to increase their skills
in mental health research. To that end, she obtained the first Minority Research Infrastructure
Support Program grant (MRISP) at MSM, which established mental health research at
MSM. Working together with the Department of Family Medicine, research was initiated
which has helped to identify racial/ethnic differences in the reporting of symptoms
of depression.
In 1998, Dr. Bradford was awarded one of the first NIH-sponsored grants in pharmacogenetics.
In collaboration with Dr. Andrea Gaedigk (Children's Mercy Hospital), Morehouse School
of Medicine has become one of the premier centers for determining polymorphic variations
of CYP450 liver enzymes which account for drug response variability in African Americans.
Genetic research has now been expanded to include searching for the etiology of schizophrenia
in African Americans. This NIMH-sponsored, initiated in 2002, is a multicenter study
of seven clinical sites (PAARTNERS) who are recruiting over 1,000 African-American
families with at least one family member affected with schizophrenia. This study
includes a genetic analysis of genes contributing to schizophrenia and a neurocognitive
battery to assess deficits and heritability. Dr. Bradford has recently been awarded
an R25 grant from NIMH to train psychiatry and other residents in mental health research.
This represents a collaborative approach between the Departments of Psychiatry at
Morehouse and Emory Schools of Medicine.
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