As a Licensing Associate – Life Sciences, Office of Technology Commercialization, Clayton works as part of multidisciplinary team that assess the potential commercial impact of invention disclosures made by Purdue faculty, staff, and students. By developing and maintaining relationships with companies and by conducting market outreach, he acts as a liaison between Purdue inventors and potential licensees for technologies in the Life Science domain.

Prior to joining OTC, Houck held several positions in the entrepreneurship world. These positions included market research manager at a start-up food-tech company, a corporate relations analyst for an educational start-up non-profit company, and market researcher for a technology start-up accelerator. In these roles, Houck gave start-up investor pitches and utilized market research to make business strategy recommendations.  Outside of entrepreneurship roles, Houck was a freelance technical writer who primarily wrote on the energy sector and semiconductor manufacturing. He also was an award-winning high school science teacher and received the Voya Unsung Heroes Award, the Toshiba America Foundation grant, and ACS- Hach High School Classroom Grant.

Houck holds a BS in Biology from Syracuse University, a MS in Biology from University of California-Riverside, and an MBA from the University of Portland. His graduate work in biology focused on the relationship between cell biology and animal behavior.  As a graduate student in the business program at the University of Portland, Houck was awarded the Pamplin Graduate Fellowship and was on a committee tasked with making recommendation towards developing the school’s entrepreneurship program. As a Licensing Associate, Houck enjoys combining his background in science with his background in business.

If you could go back in time to have dinner with one person, who would that be?

I would like to have dinner with all the famous philosophers of the past to hear their thoughts on social media and reality TV.  I suppose if I had to choose just one philosopher, I would like to have dinner with Immanuel Kant because I suspect his views of social media and reality TV would be similar to mine.

How would you explain to a child who has just mastered his/her multiplication tables that doubling a temperature of “zero degrees” does not equal zero?

Not a problem…I would simply switch topics to something I could more easily explain. This is my current parenting philosophy.

Write out in three steps what your plan of action would be if a mouse just ran by your door.

Step 1: Ignore the mouse; Step 2: Follow step 1; Step 3: Follow step 2.