New Faculty - Welcome to CBC Michael Taylor

Aug. 16, 2022
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Photo of Michael Taylor smiling

The CBC team has yet another great addition this year with faculty member Michael Taylor!

Here's a bit about his background:

From 2017 through August of 2022, Michael has held the position of Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wyoming.  Whilst at Wyoming, he developed a research program that is underpinned by an interest in developing organic transformations for use at the chemistry-biology interface.  Michael has received an NSF CAREER award, a Thieme Chemistry Journals award, an NIH outstanding investigator award, and a Presidential Scholarly Achievement Award from the University of Wyoming. 

What your position and research focus will be at UArizona? Michael will start at UA in mid-august as an Assistant Professor.  Here, his group will design, develop, and apply new organic chemical transformations that can be used to explore the chemistry-biology interface in living systems.  Through these chemistries, which form non-natural covalent bonds with biomolecules, his group aims to study how biological systems work in real-time as well as how these systems change with respect to disease states or other perturbations.  The results of these studies can have broad implications ranging from enhancing our basic understanding of biology to discovering new ligands and biomolecular targets for drug discovery.  However, chemistries that are truly biocompatible must be remarkably robust in nature and thus their development presents a unique and exciting chemical challenge. 

What you like to do in your free time?  In his free time, Mike likes to spend time with his wife, Glory, and 22-month-old daughter, Nora; typically in combination with barbecuing, hiking, and british telly.  He is also looking forward to being able to grow a garden (and actually be able to go outside) year-round!

Welcome to the Chemistry and Biochemistry team, Michael!