Reading the code of life, base by base.

A scientist since age three.

The story goes that at three years old, Taylor was already interrogating the workings of the universe, and was unimpressed when the answers didn't come. Science fairs were the highlight of every school year (volcanoes, tornado chambers, the works), and A Brief History of Time was leisure reading. Growing up on the Gulf Coast of Florida, that curiosity ran on two tracks: fishing sharpened a fascination with the biology of fish, while playing baseball turned into an obsession with the physics of the game. A fifth-grade teacher predicted a career in shark biology. The species was off; the trajectory wasn't.

That curiosity became a decade of hands-on molecular biology spanning academia, an early-stage biotech startup, and big pharma. Taylor studied Biomedical Sciences at the University of South Florida with a minor in Biomedical Physics, then earned an M.S. at Auburn University's College of Veterinary Medicine, where a pivot from reproductive medicine into cancer biology and precision medicine set the course for everything that followed.

"The through-line of my work is signal extraction: pulling meaningful sequence out of the messiest biological material, then building the method so anyone can do it again."

At Auburn, Taylor developed the first published protocol for isolating melanocytes from canine skin and oral mucosa, a rare-cell problem where the target makes up just 3-5% of skin. Recruited straight out of the thesis defense by the founders of Humane Genomics, Taylor became one of the company's first three employees and built an entire synthetic-virology lab from the bench up: qPCR pipelines, Nanopore sequencing workflows, and viral vectors engineered for precision cancer therapy. Later chapters at Merck and Azenta Life Sciences deepened that method-development rigor across high-throughput, multi-platform sequencing.

GLP/GCP-trained and fluent in translating complex biological problems into actionable research strategy, Taylor now works at the intersection of gene editing, viral vectors, and next-generation sequencing, and is eager to apply that method-development rigor within a cGMP analytical-development environment supporting first-in-human and IND products.