Bradham’s face radiates with joy as she surveys the city it took her 10 years to build—using only Lego. Even in the dim subterranean light of her basement, it’s astonishing. Built on waist-high tables, this private Legoland—made from more than 100 sets and tens of thousands of plastic bricks—stretches from one end of a 150-square-foot room to the other, leaving just about enough space for visitors to squeeze by its sides. Bradham also has a fleet of pirate ships, a galaxy of Star Wars models, and dozens of buckets filled with Lego trees, doors, wheels, and more.

“I’m a Lego black hole,” says Bradham, who has three basement rooms dedicated to the plastic bricks. “Lego can come in, but it cannot leave.”

It’s rare to find a midcareer professional with a toy collection most kids would die for. But that’s only half the story. Bradham is also among the top scientific minds in her field.

Her hobby spills over into her office at BU, where she displays 23 carefully placed, exquisitely detailed Lego models: a blue crane with a working grabber, a roaring, stomping dinosaur, the Beatles’ yellow submarine, a Sopwith Camel biplane. The toys share shelf space with dense volumes on gene expression and human anatomy and framed copies of the journals—Science , Development , Developmental Biology—that have showcased her research.

Bradham, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of biology, studies the larvae of the sea urchin Lytechinus variegatus. As adults, the sea urchins look like spiny, globular pin cushions, but at 48 hours old, they’re visually arresting: ethereally transparent and shaped a bit like a badminton shuttlecock, they shimmer in a rainbow of colors. She is on a mission to figure out the plans nature uses to create these microscopic jewels and apply that knowledge to improving our understanding of a wide range of issues related to human development, including cancer, birth defects, regenerative medicine, and the growth of new organs.