Christopher M. Taylor, PhD

Dr. Taylor earned his PhD in 2008 from the University of Virginia under the direction of Dr. Anindya Dutta (Harry F. Byrd Professor and Chair of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics) and Dr. Gabriel Robins (Professor of Computer Science). For his dissertation, Dr. Taylor developed a method for generating a continuous profile of DNA replication timing from discrete pools of replicated DNA hybridized to genome tiling microarrays. This work also proposed a method for finding origins of replication and discovering regions of the genome where alleles replicate asynchronously. This approach was presented at Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics 2008 in Melbourne, Australia and later published as part of an invited chapter for Methods in Molecular Biology in 2009. During this time, Dr. Taylor was a member of the NIH ENCODE Consortium and a member of the Chromatin, Chromosomes & Replication Analysis group as part of the ENCODE Science publication. He was also the lead analyst for replication and a member of the Integrated Analysis and Manuscript Preparation group for the ENCODE Nature publication.

After his graduate work, Dr. Taylor joined the University of New Orleans as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in 2008. As a new faculty member, Dr. Taylor shifted his focus from microarrays to the emerging technology of high throughput sequencing. He established several collaborations with basic scientists and clinical researchers in the area and developed two major branches of his subsequent research:  Microbial Community Sequencing and RNA Sequencing. This work led to the development of PARSES and RNA CoMPASS, integrated systems for dual RNA-Sequencing analysis along with a software framework for microbial community profiling.

Dr. Taylor joined LSUHSC in December 2012 as an Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Parasitology where he currently resides. He is a founding member of the Microbial Genomics Resource Group and has built an informatics laboratory at the School of Medicine focused on microbial community sequencing, analysis, and visualization. He was appointed in July 2016 as the Director of the Bioinformatics, Biostatistics and Computational Biology Core of the Louisiana Biomedical Research Network and was awarded Tenure from LSUHSC in 2017. Dr. Taylor co-organizes an annual conference on bioinformatics and computational biology for the LBRN and his research laboratory maintains several terabytes of sequence data and designs innovative software systems for visualization and analysis of high-throughput sequencing experiments.