 In the following year of 1938, Bodian spent a few months at the University of Michigan as a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow under the direction of Elizabeth Crosby.In 1938, Bodian was offered a fellowship in the Department of Anatomy at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to join Howard A. Howe to study polio in monkeys.He later came to Johns Hopkins University in 1939 as a research fellow in anatomy where he would begin a long-standing partnership with Howe.