Clayton’s run-in with brachial neuritis in high school drove him to devour literature on neuroscience. At the International Brain Bee his senior year, he met Christopher Lapish, PhD, a professor at Indiana University, who fostered his programming and robotics skills for research on substance use disorder throughout college.
The Cardin lab’s work excited him — at the time, no one else was doing large-scale recording of neuromodulator release & its effect on neural activity. To Clayton, it’s imperative to have an “affable social environment” like Yale’s, where “everyone is friendly.”
Clayton will continue studying how norepinephrine acts throughout the cortex with his F31. In the future, he wants to create a mathematical account of how aggression, sleep and other motivated behaviors emerge from cell populations, from a dynamical systems modeling angle.
Outside of research, Clayton cofounded the group “Applied Philosophy in Neuroscience” (APHINE) this year, seeking to foster an interdisciplinary environment and invite speakers for neuroscientists and philosophers alike.
“Growing up, I really enjoyed thinking about the ‘big questions,’ i.e., how do our thoughts and feelings arise from physical matter? If I hadn’t come down with a rare (but fortunately transient) neurological disorder called brachial neuritis, I likely would have gone into philosophy.” Clayton said.