Clare received her undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Oxford. Her PhD in Neuroscience was from the laboratory of Robin Franklin at the University of Cambridge in collaboration with a small biotechnology company, Summit Plc. (previously DanioLabs). Clare carried out her postdoctoral work in the laboratory of Jon Clarke at King’s College London, during which time she held a short-term EMBO fellowship at Orion Weiner’s laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco to develop the Phytochrome system for use in zebrafish. She started her lab at the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge with a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellowship and is now a Sir Henry Dale Fellow.