Clemens graduated in Biochemistry from the Freie Universitaet Berlin in 1997 and moved to Prof Christof Niehrs' lab at the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg where he worked on his PhD on the role of signalling factors of the TGFbeta and WNT families in early axis formation in the frog Xenopus laevis. After obtaining his PhD, he moved to Prof Andrew Lumsden's laboratory at King's College London in 2001 where he undertook postdoctoral research on the role of SHH and WNT signalling in the vertebrate forebrain, using the chick embryo model system, and discovered that the zona limitans intrathalamica functions as a signalling centre that is essential for cell fate specification in the diencephalon. He was awarded a lectureship at KCL in 2010 and he is now splitting his time between running his research laboratory and teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students in Anatomy, Embryology and Neuroscience. In 2014, he won the KCL Excellence in Teaching Award.
