Welcome Ashley Brady to the BRET Office of Career Development!
In April, Dr. Ashley Brady joined the Biomedical Research Education and Training (BRET) Office of Career Development at Vanderbilt University as the ASPIRE Program Manager and Director of Career Engagement and Strategic Partnerships. In this role, she will manages the design, development, and delivery of curricula and programs to provide professional skills training for biomedical sciences PhD students and postdoctoral fellows. She is also responsible for developing and managing relationships with internal and external partners, and providing career advising services for trainees.
Prior to this, she served as Associate Director of Foundation Relations at Vanderbilt University for over four years where she built relationships with private foundations, matched funding opportunities to research at Vanderbilt, and assisted faculty and trainees in developing their grant proposals targeting these private foundations. She is an experienced biomedical research scientist with expertise in molecular pharmacology, drug discovery and translational neuropharmacology.
Ashley feels as if she has come full circle, having entered graduate school at Vanderbilt in 1996 through the IGP program. She obtained her Ph.D. in Pharmacology from Vanderbilt University in 2003 during which she was supported by a PhRMA Foundation pre-doctoral fellowship. After completing her Ph.D., she received the Chateaubriand Fellowship from the French Embassy which allowed her to pursue a year of post-doctoral studies at the Institute de Génomique Fonctionnelle (IGF) at the Centre Nationale de Researche Scientifique (CNRS) in Montpellier, France. She then returned to Vanderbilt where she continued her post-doctoral training in the Department of Pharmacology and was awarded an individual Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) from the National Institute of Mental Health.
Ashley is thrilled to have had the opportunity to continue working at Vanderbilt and living in Nashville with her husband and two children.