 After two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bradbury became an assistant professor of physics at Stanford University in 1935, rising to become an associate professor in 1938, and a full professor in 1943. He became an expert on the electrical conductivity of gases, the properties of ions, and the behavior of atmospheric electricity, publishing in journals including the Physical Review, Journal of Applied Physics, Journal of Chemical Physics, and the Journal of Atmospheric Electricity and Terrestrial Magnetism. He invented the Bradbury-Nielsen shutter, a type of electrical ion gate, widely used in mass spectrometry in both time-of-flight mass spectrometers and ion mobility spectrometers.
