Layton is a resident in the Department of Neurosurgery at Yale University School of Medicine. He completed his undergraduate and medical degrees at Stanford University. While there, he developed skills in statistical programming and learned methods for causal inference on observational data, which he applied in his publications on neurosurgical outcomes. He also has experience in the analysis of scRNA-Seq data for human brain tumors. Layton is currently pursuing research interests in epilepsy and functional neurosurgery.