Taylor grew up in Illinois on the banks of the Mississippi River. He did the PhD in Brian O’Roak’s lab in Portland, Oregon, where he studied mutational effects on the cancer and autism risk gene, PTEN. For postdoctoral work, he moved to Ben Lehner’s lab in Barcelona, where he has focussed on developing and deploying massive mutagenesis platforms for understanding expression and function of GPCRs, the most important family of drug targets.