[1] She continued to work as an illustrator and was honored in 1957 by Marion Griswold Grey in the specific epithet of the dreamer Oneirodes bradburyae for her "preparation of the figure of the type specimen".
[2] In 1955 Bradbury went on a collecting trip to the Bahamas as part of a Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences expedition, and on her return to the United States she matriculated at Stanford University as a graduate student.
Here she was initially supervised by George S. Myers but switched to Rolf L. Bolin at the Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove around 1957.
Her Ph.D. dissertation was on the systematics of the deep sea batfish family, Ogcocephalidae, a group she was to study for the rest of her career and beyond until her failing eyesight stopped her work.
Bradbury also taught summer courses in ichthyology at Hopkins and took part in expeditions on the schooner Te Vega.