Dr. Derek Claxton, PhD was born the son of an Inland Steel worker and a homemaker in Northwest Indiana in 1982. Upon retirement of his father from the steel industry in 1992, Derek’s family relocated to the South spending time on small farms in Russell Springs, KY and Athens, AL. After completing his general education at Clements High School in 2000, Derek received a BS in chemistry with honors from the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2004. As an undergraduate, Derek worked in the Laboratory for Structural Biology led by Dr. Enrico DiGiammarino (currently Principal Research Scientist, AbbVie Inc) and Dr. Edward Meehan (Professor Emeritus, UAH) to investigate ubiquitin conjugating enzymes. Derek pursued the PhD degree at Vanderbilt University under the guidance of Dr. Hassane S. Mchaourab, where he used electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy to study the structural dynamics of the leucine transporter (LeuT), the founding member of the LeuT-fold class of transporters and a prokaryotic homolog of eukaryotic neurotransmitter transporters. During graduate school, Derek married Ashley Robison whom he had met at a small church east of Athens, AL. Derek received postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Eric Gouaux at the Vollum Institute, Oregon Health & Science University to study the structure and function of pentameric ligand gated ion channels. 18 months into the fellowship, Derek and Ashley experienced a life-changing event with the birth of their three children, Abigail, Benjamin and Chloe in 2012. Derek then transitioned to research faculty in 2014 at Vanderbilt University in the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics under the leadership of Dr. Mchaourab to explore the structural biology of multi-drug transporters implicated in antibiotic resistance. In 2023, Derek was given an opportunity to establish a new research enterprise in the department as Assistant Professor where he leverages a suite of approaches including computational predictions and biophysical analysis to study the structure and function of enzymes and transporters that mediate fundamental reactions in glucose metabolism.
Derek’s laboratory receives support from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.