"We found that whenever birds heard songs we detected this big change in gene expression in that part of the brain," he said. "After the song becomes familiar this song habituates, it goes away. We think the response is related to the storage of memories about the experience."

In 2001 Clayton was lead author on a paper in Nature Neuroscience that explained how and why it is that only male zebra finches produce songs (the male brain produces estrogen at exactly the right time of brain development). In 2006 Clayton and colleagues reported in the journal Neuron that, based on their study of how zebra finches learn their songs, a protein that plays a role in killing cells also was an important factor in memory formation. That finding could have implications for the study and treatment of diseases like Alzheimer's.

From his papers and articles it's obvious Clayton's research overlaps between the study of a specific organism, songbirds, and the areas of genetics and neuroscience. Clayton's work focuses on how the zebra finch brain develops, how the males learn their songs, and the symbiotic relationship between that process, brain development, and genetics.

"There is a big piece of hormone biology in here; there are big differences between the sexes, males and females, and that's interesting," Clayton said of his research. "There's a developmental story, brain circuitry, after the animal is hatched. So it's possible to track their development when they are an adolescent; that's when this big circuit forms. All those kind of complex things suggest a whole series of questions that one could ask about what controls the development of the system, why is it different in males and females, what happens when a bird sings, what happens when a bird hears songs. And we knew where to look."

Clayton said the male zebra finch learns its unique song from its father/tutor during adolescence by copying and then slightly varying the song of the tutor.

"There is this critical period when it is basically an adolescent when he - and only the male learns to sing - hears his tutor and forms a memory of his tutor and then he has to practice over a two-month period," he said. "He rehearses and what he ends up with is a good but not a perfect copy, because every bird sings his own unique song, but he ends up with his own little take on his tutor's song. Once he's learned it at 90 days of age, once he's sexually mature, it's like it is set in stone."

To study these phenomena more closely, Clayton is working with Monica Fabiani and Gabriele Gratton of Beckman's Cognitive Neuroscience group, using their EROS optical imaging technique to study Zebra finches non-invasively and in a more natural way. The birds wear a specially designed helmet that can record which parts of the brain are activated during both the phase when young males are learning a song and when both genders of the species are learning to recognize songs.

"One of our big projects at Beckman is trying to take advantage of this localization of function to analyze what happens when a bird hears a novel song and it becomes familiar," Clayton said of using EROS. "The idea there is to be able to monitor in real time, more or less, activity in the brain. If we can develop this technique we would be able to follow it in a non-invasive way over time, observing how a song becomes familiar."

Clayton's collaboration with Gratton and Fabiani was the result of the interdisciplinary nature of Beckman and some good fortune when one of his former Ph.D. students, Amy Kruse, took a job with the Department of Defense's research organization that was funding part of Fabiani and Gratton's work.

"It turns out that she became the program officer for Monica and Gabriele, and I ran into her a few years after she was out of the lab," Clayton said. "She said 'I was just down the hall at the Beckman seeing Monica and Gabriele and they're doing this amazing stuff. You ought to do it with the songbirds.'"

While it was a fortuitous coincidence, collaborations like the one with Gratton and Fabiani are part of the reason why Clayton came to the University of Illinois.

"One of the reasons I chose to move to Illinois was the Beckman," Clayton said. "I was drawn to the environment here and I've always had a presence at Beckman since I set foot here."

Clayton said the interdisciplinary approach at Beckman has been "absolutely essential" to his work.

"It immediately draws from many traditions," he added. "I think being at the Beckman has afforded access to the technical and intellectual. I've had access to people like for example Monica and Gabriele. I think this is a very important big picture kind of thing to be developing and it would not be happening for were it not for the Beckman."