Rate My Professor Bradford Smith

Bradford Smith is an Associate Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Colorado Denver's Anschutz Medical Campus, part of the College of Engineering, Design and Computing. He leads the Pulmonary Biomechanics Lab, focusing on the pathogenesis and treatment of acute respiratory distress syndrome and ventilator-induced lung injury. His research integrates in vivo models of lung injury, computer-controlled mechanical ventilation, immunohistochemistry, electron microscopy, design-based stereology, electrical impedance tomography, biochemical assays, and multi-scale computational models. These approaches elucidate how fluid-mechanical stresses and surface tension forces in alveoli contribute to cellular-scale injury and organ-scale dysfunction. Smith develops innovative ventilation strategies, devices, and algorithms to mitigate ventilator-induced lung injury in critical care settings.

Earning his MS in Biomedical Engineering from Tulane University in 2007 and PhD in 2011, Smith received the Graduate Student Outstanding award from Tulane's Biomedical Engineering department. He joined the University of Colorado Denver as Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering in 2016 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in summer 2024. His work is funded by prestigious NIH grants, including R01HL151630 (2021-2025, Principal Investigator) on predicting and preventing ventilator-induced lung injury, R00HL128944 (2017-2020, PI) on lung injury inhomogeneity, and K99HL128944 (2015-2017, PI). Key publications include 'Ventilator-induced lung injury and lung mechanics' with J.H.T. Bates (Annals of Translational Medicine, 2018), 'Is progression of pulmonary fibrosis due to ventilation-induced lung injury?' with R.K. Albert et al. (American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, 2019), 'Mechanical breath profile of airway pressure release ventilation' (JAMA Surgery, 2014), and recent articles such as 'Dynamic driving pressure predicts ventilator-induced lung injury' (American Journal of Physiology - Lung Cellular and Molecular Physiology, 2025) and 'A scale-free model of acute and ventilator-induced lung injury' (Frontiers in Network Physiology, 2024). With over 150 publications and citations exceeding 2000, Smith's contributions advance pulmonary biomechanics and respiratory critical care.