Susan S. Taylor

Susan S. Taylor explores the structures of enzymes that control the bodily changes taking place over a person's lifetime, such as the enzymes that stimulate memory and growth. She and her team are clearing a path to new drugs that can fight disease.

Taylor studies a type of enzyme called a protein kinase. She is well known for having determined the molecular structure of a particular enzyme called protein kinase C. Her research group studies molecules called signals interact with protein kinases. A signal molecule "tells" or "signals" a kinase to start working and to stop. Taylor's group hopes to learn how to control the interaction between signals and protein kinases because malfunctioning protein kinases are thought to be involved with cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer's disease.

Courtesy Nina Haste.

Taylor didn't set a rigid career plan for herself. She took risks by following her interests. She says of her experience: "My life has been a series of these little chances, very serendipitous."

About Her Life

Susan S. Taylor never planned on becoming a scientist. She was born in 1942, and as a child in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she'd always wanted to be a doctor. In college at the University of Wisconsin, she majored in chemistry, inspired by a good chemistry professor named Charles Sorum. She planned to go to medical school after graduation, but in her senior year her life took a twist. Her fiancé took a job at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and Taylor hadn't applied to any schools in that part of the country. Johns Hopkins University, in nearby Baltimore, might have been a good choice, but by the time she became engaged, the application deadline for the medical school had passed. Instead, she applied to their graduate school, was accepted, and studied physiological chemistry. Yet even when she graduated with her Ph.D. in 1968, she still planned to go to medical school.

Now married, her husband’s career once again altered her plans to become a medical doctor. He had decided to travel to Cambridge University in the United Kingdom for further study. Taylor put her plans on hold and took a post-doctoral job at Cambridge. It was there that she began to do research on proteins. She fell in love with protein chemistry, and only after many years as a practicing chemist, did shelve her medical school plans for good. Later, when her husband took a faculty position at the University of California at San Diego in 1971, she returned to the United States with him. She first did more post-doctoral work at UCSD and after about a year was hired as a professor.

More than 30 years and three children later, Taylor still studies proteins at UCSD. Taylor has earned many honors in her career. Most notably, she became a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the Institute of Medicine in 1996.

For Further Reading on the Web

Susan S. Taylor Laboratory — the official page of Taylor 's research group at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California at San Diego.