Jacquelyn Taylor is an American nurse-scientist and Professor of Nursing and Director of the Center for Research on People of Color at Columbia University School of Nursing. Her research focuses on health disparities in underrepresented minority populations. Her work combines approaches in omics, such as genomics, epigenomics and whole genome sequencing, with an understanding of underlying social factors that contribute to health outcomes. In 2019, she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in recognition of her work.
In 2005, Taylor became an Assistant Professor of Nursing at the University of Michigan. In 2008, she moved to Connecticut, where she became Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Diversity and Inclusion at Yale School of Nursing. While at Yale, she was Contact PI on a five-year study, receiving funding support from the National Institute of Nursing Research at the National Institutes of Health. The study, known as the Intergenerational Impact of Genetic and Psychological Factors on Blood Pressure study, investigated the combined impact of genetic, environmental, and psychological stressors on blood pressure, with a focus on members of the African American community. During her tenure, she also began to study the genomics of lead poisoning in response to the ongoing Flint water crisis, developing a method to simultaneously measure lead levels and test genotypes of children to identify genetic factors that increased risk of long-term damage. As a graduate student at Wayne State, she also investigated the interplay between gene variants and environmental exposure to lead among children in Detroit. She identified a correlation between children with a variant of the gene that codes for arylsulfatase A and an increased risk of neurodevelopmental damage as a result of exposure to lead. In 2018, Taylor joined the faculty at New York University, becoming the inaugural Vernice D. Ferguson Professor in Health Equity where she remained until 2020. There, she served as the co-Principal Investigator on a five-year grant award, which established the NYU Meyers Center for Precision Health in Diverse Populations. The center would train nurse scientists to study chronic conditions and their underlying biology, with the goal of reducing their burden on marginalized communities. In 2020, she became a Professor of Nursing and Director for the Center for Research on People of Color at Columbia UniversitySchool of Nursing. Throughout her career, Taylor has also been an advocate for improving precision health in minority populations — with a focus on the roles and responsibilities of nurse scientists — as a strategy for reducing health disparities.
