Wesley Clawson, Staff Scientist

Wesley Clawson received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Physics from the University of Arkansas in 2014 and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering in 2016. During this time, Wesley worked in the labs of Dr. Woodrow Shew at the University of Arkansas and with Dr. Ralf Wessel at Wash U St. Louis. Wesley worked as a Cloud Architect at Windstream Communications from 2016-2018. After, he received his PhD in Neuroscience in 2021 at the Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes (INS) in Marseille, France under the direction of Dr. Christophe Bernard. Wesley has been at the Allen Institute since late 2021.

Overall, my research interests revolve around embodied cognition and learning. My research focus during my time at the University of Arkansas was on investigating criticality in the visual cortex and its potential functional properties using ex-vivo turtle brains. Mounting evidence indicates that some neural populations may sit at criticality and this statistical phenomenon is tied to certain brain functions. It is a continued area of research for me. My PhD research was again focused on neural populations and on how they process information; and also on how information processing is related to computation. We investigated these computational signatures in epilepsy and hope to extend this framework to other diseases. My current research involves studying neural cultures via a closed-loop system that allows for real-time interaction between a population of neurons and virtual worlds, investigating how cultures learn and adapt as a collective intelligence.