Susan Clayton received her B.A. from Carleton College in 1982 and her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1987. She is a member of the International Society for Justice Research (ISJR) and a Fellow of Divisions 9 and 34 and of the American Psychological Association. She is the editor of Human Ecology Review, the journal of the Society for Human Ecology. Clayton is on the editorial boards for the Journal of Environmental Psychology, the Journal of Social Issues, and Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy. She is a past president of Division 34, Population and Environmental Psychology

Clayton's current research focuses on the ways in which people's social identities and relationships reflect interactions with the natural environment, and on how to utilize these relationships to promote environmental conservation. This falls more generally within the emerging subfield of conservation psychology, focusing on the ways in which humans relate to the natural world. Clayton is also interested in research on justice and on identity, including gender as a group identity. She has developed an environmental identity scale, which has shown demonstrated reliability and validity in a number of scales. It is available for research use.