The Beckman Institute is an interdisciplinary-research institute named after scientist and philanthropist Arnold O. Beckman (1900-2004). It is famous for imaging and other research. At 313,000 square feet (29,100 m²), it is among the largest interdisciplinary research facilities.

It is affiliated with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology was conceived in 1983 as part of a plan to develop multidisciplinary research between Engineering and the Life Sciences. The primary facility for the Beckman Institute was conceived of in 1984 by grace of a gift of $40 million (87 million 2011 dollars) from Dr. Arnold O. Beckman, and completed in 1989. Today the Beckman Institute is made up of 600 researchers from over 40 different University departments and is home to 13 research groups.

The Beckman Institute focuses on research in four main themes, Biological Intelligence, Human-Computer Intelligent Interaction, Integrative Imaging, and Molecular & Electronic Nanostructures.

David George Clayton, born 13 June 1944, is a distinguished British statistician and epidemiologist. He is titular Professor of Biostatistics in the University of Cambridge and Wellcome Trust and Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Principal Research Fellow in the Diabetes and Inflammation Laboratory, where he chairs the statistics group. Clayton is an ISI highly cited researcher placing him in the top 250 most cited scientists in mathematics the world over the last 20 years.

Clayton has worked in theoretical and applied statistics, both frequentist and Bayesian. With Norman Breslow he has published important work on generalized linear mixed models. Clayton was a pioneer in the application of MCMC methods to problems in biostatistics. More recently, he has worked in genetic epidemiology.

Clayton read Natural Sciences at King's College, Cambridge and following this worked as a researcher in ergonomics and cybernetics. He then worked as a statistician at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the University of Leicester and the MRC Biostatistics Unit in Cambridge before taking up his present position.