Claire Hanson

Claire is an MD/PhD student interested in psychiatry and neuroscience. She completed her undergraduate education at Vanderbilt University in 2021, where she majored in neuroscience and minored in French. Her undergraduate thesis earned her highest honors; she probed the use of computational models in decision-making electrophysiology and used simulations to characterize the spiking characteristics of decision-making neurons. She then worked as a post-baccalaureate research trainee at the National Institute of Mental Health before returning to Vanderbilt in 2023 for medical school. She began the PhD portion of her training in 2025. Claire is interested in investigating mechanistic hypotheses of network-level dysfunction in psychosis using neuroimaging methods. As a future psychiatrist, she is interested in contributing to an understanding of psychosis that can be applied at the individual level to patients. She is currently the co-director of the Shade Tree Psychiatry Clinic, a student-run free clinic that serves uninsured individuals in the Nashville area. In her free time, she enjoys creative coding and taking long walks with her dog.