Clayton Mansel

Professional Background

I have lived in Missouri my entire life. After being raised in Springfield, MO, I attended college at William Jewell which is a small liberal arts college just north of Kansas City. There, I studied molecular biology and attended St. Catherine's College at the University of Oxford as a visiting student during my junior year where I studied public health and immunology. After graduating from William Jewell with honors, I worked in Dr. David Holtzman's lab at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine where I studied the role of the innate immune system in a mouse model of Alzheimer's Disease.

My PhD mentor is Dr. Olivia Veatch Broadly, I am currently interested in how we can use genotype and phenotype data (e.g., from the electronic health record) to understand the heterogeneity and pathological mechanisms underlying common diseases. Currently, I am working on a project that aims to use mitochondrial haplotype and clinical survey data to sub-phenotype a national database of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Soon, I plan to use data from KU’s electronic health record to detect distinct sub-phenotypes of Alzheimer’s patients using unsupervised machine learning techniques.

Outside of my professional life I love to explore my KC via bike, advocate for stronger communities, and go on adventures with my wife Riley and our two dogs Timber and Stella.

Mentor: Olivia Veatch, Molecular and Integrative Physiology.