Student Profiles

Taylor first realized she was interested in a career in research while volunteering at a veterinary hospital in high school. Although the experience was intended to reinforce her desire to be a veterinarian, she found the diagnostic tests and bench work to be the most intriguing parts of the job, pushing her to pursue a degree in Microbiology from Colorado State University (CSU). 

Following a brief summer internship at AstraZeneca, Taylor became captivated by the field of Immunology and joined the lab of Dr. Mark Zabel in the Prion Research Center at CSU. There, she studied the function of a complement regulatory protein, factor H, in prion pathogenesis and helped identify factor H as a novel soluble prion receptor that may influence prion strain selection. 

After graduating magna cum laude from CSU in 2015, Taylor joined the Post-baccalaureate program at the NIH under the mentorship of Dr. Richard Siegel of NIAMS. In the Siegel lab, she investigated the role of a Tumor Necrosis Factor superfamily receptor, DR3, and its ligand, TL1A, in multiple models of autoimmune disease. While at the NIH, she became fascinated by the field of Microbiome research. As an NIH-Oxford scholar, Taylor will study non-classical immune responses to the microbiome in steady state and inflammation.