…and one garage-built airplane.
Biologist and mechanical engineer. I publish on insect biomechanics, build the pressure housings that go down the Amazon with me, and fly the Cozy Mark IV my father and I riveted together at home. Research that requires a passport, a wrench, and a logbook.
Click a terracotta pin to open its letter, click anywhere else on the plot to fill the screen.
Peer-reviewed biomechanics, competitive grants, expeditions on three continents, and the instruments built along the way to finish them. Click a card to flip it.
Lead author. High-speed characterisation of Aedes aegypti takeoff across surface roughness regimes — biomechanics that later fed a micro-drone prototype.
Bioinspiration & Biomimetics 14(1) Flip for photo ↻I was responsible for the full in-lab experimental design and build, even though I am not cited in this paper.
UCF Dept. of Biology · adviser Dr. William Crampton Flip for photo ↻Funded proposal to characterise mosquito takeoff and landing leg dynamics across surface roughnesses and translate the findings into a military micro-drone prototype.
DARPA Flip for photo ↻Designed, machined, and field-proved a custom high-pressure underwater housing and white-water deployment rig for Amazon River work, built for underwater electric monitoring of Gymnotiformes on the river substrate. Built end-to-end in-house.
Journeyman3D · Amazonas Flip for photo ↻Short term research assistant in Kruger National Park studying artificial watering holes during drought — elephant health, group dynamics, inter-group communication, migration.
Kruger National Park, ZA Flip for photo ↻Microplastics shed from car tires in Central Florida waterways. Judges’ Choice Award, Research Intensive Division — presented again for oncology inpatients at Nemours.
UCF SURE Showcase Flip for photo ↻Winning entry in the UCF ELI² Google Sprint World Problem Challenge — a deployable approach to the global nitrogen crisis.
ELI² Google Sprint Flip for photo ↻Scientific crew, Tampa Bay and Gulf of Mexico. Species diversity and dispersion, and stormwater runoff effects on bay populations against Gulf specimens.
USF R.V. Hogarth Flip for photo ↻Redesigned tracker installation tooling for the UCF Mansfield Lab so devices survived attachment — measurably longer retention on the animal.
UCF Mansfield Lab Flip for photo ↻Supported my undergrad work in biomechanics and biomimicry.
Ronald E. McNair Program Flip for photo ↻Keynote presenter at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology annual conference, San Francisco.
SICB 2018 Flip for photo ↻Assisted veterinary surgical teams, ran chelonian research projects, and handled hatchling washback, restabilisation, and release across all five marine turtle species.
Volusia Marine Science Center · NMFS 19496 · FWC 243 Flip for photo ↻When the instrument does not exist yet, that is the first task. Custom pressure housings, CNC and lathe work, scientific glasswork, and high-speed camera rigs — Journeyman3D exists because field biology kept asking for hardware nobody sells.
Taught 3rd through 8th grade on my own, coached middle-school robotics and physics, and built my own STEM demonstrations — acoustic levitation, linear flow, ferrofluid electromagnetics. I have keynoted SICB and also presented to oncology inpatients at Nemours, which is the harder room by some distance.
Discover outreachFounded and grew Masterfix Corporation from a one-man handyman operation into a national brand-maintenance partner — electrical, plumbing, build-outs, flooring, demolition, and more for retailers including Disney, Universal, Home Depot, and Louis Vuitton. Also co-founded a 501(c)(3) that has moved 15,000 lb of school supplies and about $80,000 to the Dominican Republic across eleven years — it still runs without me, which was the point.
Discover MasterfixAfter a decade building Masterfix into a regional partner, I left to start Iconic Retail Solutions, LLC — the same national-brand facilities and maintenance work, run independently.
Discover Iconic Retail SolutionsFirst place in the 2020 Advanced Marine Biology Photography Competition. 14mm for reef walls and fissures, 100mm macro for the high-speed insect rig, 200mm for anything with tusks. Drone documentation for commercial sites through Journeyman Photography.
Discover the galleryTell me who you are and what the role needs. The letter to the right rewrites itself, in my voice, ready to copy.
Dear Hiring Committee,
It is a real pleasure to write to you about the this role at your team. I build things that have to survive contact with the field, and from everything I can see, so do you.
Fieldwork is where I am most useful. Kruger National Park during a third drought year, tracking nine elephant herds against artificial waterholes. Six weeks on the Amazon running hypoxia work on electric fishes, including the full in-lab experimental design. A Gulf research cruise aboard the R.V. Hogarth. I plan the logistics, carry the permits, and bring back clean data.
The through-line is stubborn curiosity applied with tools. First-author work on mosquito takeoff biomechanics that has been cited 11 times; a DARPA undergraduate grant to turn it into a micro-drone; a Cozy Mark IV, N493GC, that my father and I built in our garage and that I have now flown 1,000 hours; 86 countries; five marine turtle species through rehabilitation and release. I am comfortable being the person who both writes the protocol and fixes the pump at 2 a.m.
I would love to talk — about your team, about what the this role actually needs on a hard week, and about anything on my logbook you are curious about.
With genuine enthusiasm,
Grace V. Clayton
The housing held. Forty-one metres down a black-water channel, and the O-rings I turned on our own lathe never wept a drop. Gymnotiformes came to the light in ones and twos — gill filaments broader on the hypoxic side of the channel, much as the tank data suggested they would be.
Field-verified · logbook BR-14 Drag the prints
Third drought year. We seeded artificial waterholes and then mostly watched — who came, in what order, and who deferred. The matriarchs adjusted their migration lines within about eleven days. A dataset that arrived with a good deal of dignity attached to it.
Field-verified · logbook ZA-07 Drag the prints
Fifteen thousand pounds of pencils and protractors across five summers, and the thing I remember is a nine-year-old asking whether I would be back next year. I said yes. The organisation still goes every summer, run now by high schoolers who were not born when we filed the paperwork.
Field-verified · logbook DR-05 Drag the prints
Ras Mohammed on a running current — you do not swim so much as consent. Visibility past forty metres. A napoleon wrasse followed the whole drift with the air of an unpaid inspector.
Field-verified · logbook EG-11 Drag the prints
Cold-soaked the canard overnight and briefed the leg twice. Silfra the next morning: two degrees, tectonic plates at either shoulder, and about the clearest water on the planet. Flew, then dove, then slept for eleven hours.
Field-verified · logbook IS-03 Drag the prints
Outer ribbon reefs. Counted, photographed, and quietly grieved in roughly equal measure. Also the first cuttlefish to hold eye contact long enough that leaving felt impolite.
Field-verified · logbook AU-09 Drag the prints
First real cross-country in a homebuilt airplane: Sanford to the Gulf Coast and back, engine instruments watched more than the horizon for the first two hours. My father flew the right seat and said nothing useful the entire way, on purpose. The riveting held, and so did I.
Field-verified · logbook US-01 Drag the prints
Took the canard north to see what a homebuilt does at four degrees with a stiff crosswind — the answer was mostly fine, with one sticky carb heat cable fixed on the ramp with a hex key and language my mother would not approve of. Ontario from nine thousand feet looks like a circuit board.
Field-verified · logbook CA-06 Drag the prints
The halocline sits at about eleven metres and blurs the world like a bad windshield — fresh water on top, salt below, your own hand disappearing at the seam. Stalactites that formed in open air, now sixty feet under, which is its own kind of engineering problem I did not solve so much as float through.
Field-verified · logbook MX-04 Drag the prints
Stick insects that outweigh the twig they are pretending to be, and a walking-stick femur that flexes at almost the exact angle my undergrad thesis predicted it should not. Rain nine days out of ten, which is apparently the whole point of a cloud forest and no one warns you how loud it is.
Field-verified · logbook CR-08 Drag the prints
Watched a container ship lift twenty-six metres through the Gatun Locks in the time it took to eat a sandwich, then spent four days three kilometres inland measuring beetle mandibles in the rain. Both are the same discipline, really — water moved with precision, or force applied exactly where it counts.
Field-verified · logbook PA-02 Drag the prints
Elkhorn coral recovering faster than the literature predicted, along a stretch nobody had surveyed since a hurricane scoured it in the nineties. Spent more time than planned just watching a hawksbill turtle who clearly had somewhere to be and no interest in my clipboard.
Field-verified · logbook CO-03 Drag the prints
Forty-five minutes over open water is a long time to think about single-engine reliability, and then Andros appears with blue holes visible from four thousand feet like ink dropped in cream. Landed on a strip barely longer than the plane needed, which is the entire appeal of a Cozy.
Field-verified · logbook BS-05 Drag the prints
The last fuel stop before the ocean gets serious — Santa Maria, a runway that has watched small airplanes make this same nervous calculation for eighty years. Filed the oceanic clearance twice because I did not believe the first read-back, then flew four hours over water that stays the same shade of nothing the whole way.
Field-verified · logbook PT-01 Drag the prints
Two days on the ground doing nothing that could be called research, unless the Cliffs of Moher count as a structural engineering lecture on erosion. Slept eleven hours the first night and still felt like the Atlantic was somewhere behind my sternum.
Field-verified · logbook IE-02 Drag the prints
Spent longer in front of a de Havilland Mosquito than is probably normal, mostly admiring the wooden monocoque construction — a plywood airplane that outran the fighters sent to catch it. Photographed rivet patterns the way other tourists photograph the Queen.
Field-verified · logbook EN-03 Drag the prints
Three days above the treeline with a pack that seemed reasonable in the trailhead parking lot and stopped seeming reasonable by hour two. The Mer de Glace has retreated visibly even against ten-year-old photographs pinned up in the hut, which is its own kind of field data, unglamorous and unwelcome.
Field-verified · logbook FR-07 Drag the prints
A watchmaker in Le Locle let me hold a balance wheel under magnification for longer than his patience probably allowed, and I have thought about escapements more than is reasonable ever since. Tolerances measured in microns, by hand, by people who inherited the bench from a grandfather. Humbling, in the specific way only very good machining is.
Field-verified · logbook CH-01 Drag the prints
Stood in a doorway in Pompeii shaped exactly like the person who died running for it, then took the funicular up a volcano that is overdue by most of the metrics that matter. The engineering of the eruption itself — pressure, ejecta velocity, the physics of being buried in nine hours — is the kind of catastrophe I can only appreciate from a very safe distance of two thousand years.
Field-verified · logbook IT-02 Drag the prints
A WWII transport resting on its side at twenty-eight metres, amphora fragments scattered around it from a wreck roughly two thousand years older, both slowly becoming the same kind of reef. Nobody agrees on whose the amphorae are, which felt like the correct amount of mystery to leave a dive site.
Field-verified · logbook GR-01 Drag the prints
A sheer drop that keeps going past where the light does, and a resident grouper the local operators have apparently named, though nobody could agree on what. Adriatic water is startlingly clear for how much shipping traffic runs through it a few miles north.
Field-verified · logbook HR-01 Drag the prints
Volcanic tuff soft enough to carve with hand tools and hard enough to hold a nine-hundred-year-old ceiling, which is a materials-science contradiction I did not expect to find so moving. Went up in a balloon at dawn mostly to see the fairy chimneys from directly above, and stayed quiet the whole flight, which is unusual for me.
Field-verified · logbook TR-01 Drag the prints
The reef here sits at the very top of the Gulf of Aqaba and has shrugged off warming that has bleached reefs a thousand kilometres south — coral that may simply be better built for what is coming. Spent most of the dive with a thermometer instead of a camera, for once.
Field-verified · logbook IL-01 Drag the prints
The Siq is a slot canyon carved by water and then by two thousand years of sandal traffic, and the Treasury facade at the end of it earns every photograph ever taken of it. Camped in Wadi Rum after, where the silence has an almost physical weight and the stars do not need any help from me to be impressive.
Field-verified · logbook JO-01 Drag the prints
Followed a khettara — an underground gravity-fed irrigation tunnel, hand-dug, some of them nine hundred years old — for about a kilometre with a headlamp and a surveyor who has spent his career maintaining a system older than the nation itself. No pumps, no electricity, just slope calculated correctly the first time and never touched since.
Field-verified · logbook MA-01 Drag the prints
A smaller, earlier cousin of the Dominican Republic trips — one classroom, one water-catchment tank, and a crew of us who had no business being trusted with concrete mixing ratios but got them right anyway. Cape Coast Castle is close enough to hear the surf from the school yard, which nobody explains to you beforehand and which changes the whole week.
Field-verified · logbook GH-01 Drag the prints
Dugongs still graze the seagrass beds here, which is rarer every year and worth every hour of the six spent getting to a dive site that far from anything. Manta cleaning station at eighteen metres, and a current strong enough that the whole survey was conducted at a diagonal.
Field-verified · logbook MZ-01 Drag the prints
Fjords on the Arabian Peninsula are not something the brochures prepare you for — sheer rock walls dropping straight into water warm enough to dive without a wetsuit lining. A pod of dolphins escorted the boat out and, less charmingly, a jellyfish bloom escorted us back in.
Field-verified · logbook OM-01 Drag the prints
A building tall enough to watch the sun set twice if the elevator is fast enough, and forty minutes later, dunes with no engineering in them at all except what wind has been doing patiently for ten thousand years. Both impressed me; only one of them let me sleep afterward.
Field-verified · logbook AE-01 Drag the prints
Scouted a stretch of reef nobody in my research network had logged, ahead of a dive trip that got rescheduled twice for weather. Came home with coordinates, water temperature logs, and no actual dive to show for it — the unglamorous half of fieldwork that never makes the letter home, except apparently this one.
Field-verified · logbook SA-01 Drag the prints
Six weeks in the Western Ghats chasing stick insects and walking sticks through a monsoon forest that does not care about a research schedule. Found a species doing something with tibial spines nobody had written up yet, which is the entire reason any of us do this.
Field-verified · logbook IN-04 Drag the prints
Not a dive so much as a very long stare off the bow — blue whales surfacing close enough to hear the exhale before the spout, off a continental shelf that drops fast just offshore. Logged three individuals and one calf, and did not say a word for most of the afternoon.
Field-verified · logbook LK-01 Drag the prints
Took an early version of the pressure housing to twenty-eight metres in water clear enough to see the boat from the bottom, mostly to confirm a seal design ahead of the Amazon trip years later. It held. Manta season had just started, which nobody warned me about and which made the control-group dives considerably harder to focus on.
Field-verified · logbook MV-02 Drag the prints
A forty-hour layover turned into a proper visit once I found the Science Centre and lost track of time in the gallery on structural failure. The whole city runs like something designed by a very good committee, which as an engineer is meant as a genuine compliment.
Field-verified · logbook SG-01 Drag the prints
Manta cleaning station at Koh Bon, a whale shark on the last day that nobody on the boat believed until it happened again the next morning, and water so warm the wetsuit felt like an act of caution nobody needed. Best visibility of the year, by a wide margin.
Field-verified · logbook TH-02 Drag the prints
Limestone towers that look implausible in every photograph and somehow more implausible in person, dissolved out of a plateau over roughly twenty million years by water finding the path of least resistance, patiently, the way water always does. A week on a boat between them, taking far too many photographs that all look nearly identical and are somehow each worth keeping.
Field-verified · logbook VN-01 Drag the prints
Watched a factory floor run with a tolerance and a quiet that felt almost reverent, then spent an afternoon in a robotics lab looking at insect-inspired actuators that owe an obvious debt to the same biomechanics papers on my own shelf. A strange, good feeling to see the field taken this seriously by people building actual machines.
Field-verified · logbook JP-02 Drag the prints
Continued straight on from Japan for a robotics conference and a fabrication lab that allowed a part run on their CNC, mostly out of professional curiosity about their tolerances, not mine. Ate better than the trip had any right to allow, given how much of it was spent in convention centers.
Field-verified · logbook KR-01 Drag the prints
The most biodiverse reef on the planet is exactly as overwhelming as the literature claims — species-counting stopped about six minutes into the first dive, replaced by just watching. A pygmy seahorse the size of a fingernail took twenty minutes of very patient guiding to actually find.
Field-verified · logbook ID-01 Drag the prints
Four days on the Milford Track in weather that changed completely about every ninety minutes, then a helicopter landing on a glacier that has retreated visibly even in guide photos from a decade ago. Kept a running note of tree-line elevation the whole trek out of habit more than any real research plan, which is possibly a professional flaw.
Field-verified · logbook NZ-01 Drag the prints
