With a B.S. degree in biology and training as a molecular biologist, Dan Bradford started his scientific career genotyping populations of paddlefish. Bradford also spent time as a microbiologist culturing the nitrogen-fixing bacteria Rhizobium for various agricultural products. Since joining the former Molecular Biology team at the Institute in 2005, Bradford has worked with numerous laboratory automation systems to develop novel high-throughput protocols and screens. He has been instrumental in developing high-throughput automated techniques including qPCR karyotyping of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Candida albicans, yeast-based high-content screening, and spectral karyotyping. He was an early adopter of synthetic genetic array technology for functional genomics screens. In 2019, Bradford was appointed senior laboratory manager of the newly formed Automation and PCR Technology team.