Lawrence August Taylor was an American geochemist and petrologist working at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the University of Tennessee. He is the founder of the UT Planetary Geosciences Institute and was also its director until late 2017. Taylor was a graduate of the Indiana University at Bloomington, where he obtained a Bachelor's Degree in Chemistry and a Master's Degree in Geology. He would move on to receive a PhD from Lehigh University, perform pre-doctoral experimental petrology research at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and finally a Fulbright Fellowship at the Max-Planck-Institüt für Kernphysik in Heidelberg, Germany. In December 1972, Taylor was offered to be in the “back room” of Johnson Space Center during the Apollo 17 mission where he had the opportunity to directly advise astronauts on their extravehicular activities on the Moon. Subsequently, Taylor became very close friends with Harrison Schmitt, the last man to step on the lunar surface and the sole geologist to ever reach the Moon. The two would collaborate throughout their careers with Schmitt playing an influential role in helping Taylor develop the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UT. In 1973, after 2 years of being an Assistant Professor at Purdue University, Taylor would arrive at the University of Tennessee, near the very beginning of the institution's dive into research. Taylor would remain at the University of Tennessee for the latter half of his life and become “one of the true giants in the field” of lunar science and the Director of the University of Tennessee Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences until his retirement in 2017.
In 1958, Taylor left New York City "one step ahead of the law" and started additional education at the Indiana University in Bloomington. In 1961, Taylor graduated but decided to stay and achieve a master's degree in geology due to a friend's persuasion. During this period, Taylor took on many miscellaneous occupations that included: driller, rocker shovel loader, powder-monkey, and geologist in mines in Ontario, Canada. In 1965, Taylor's two children, Kelly and Jeff, were born, and he was introduced to planetary geology at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Taylor would continue his studies at various universities and institutes until 1971, when he was hired as an assistant professor at Purdue University. Just two years later, Taylor would move to the University of Tennessee.
Later career and death (1973–2017)
At the University of Tennessee, Taylor would achieve tenure after only two years and then become a full professor after another two years. In 1993, Taylor married Dong-Hwa Shin. Throughout the rest of his career, Taylor would produce 542 peer-reviewed research papers, and would eventually partially retire in 2017 after 46 years of work. Taylor died on September 18, 2017, four days after his 79th birthday. Taylor's longtime colleague, Hap McSween, remembers him as a "diamond in the rough" and states that his "constant presence in the department will be missed."
Works
Taylor led a prolific 46-year career with more than 100 articles published in science journals including:
In 2005, Taylor met with S. Ross Taylor and G. Jeffrey Taylor in the Gatlinburg, TennesseeMeteorological Society meeting to write "The Moon—A Taylor Perspective," also known as the "Taylor-cubed paper." This article was featured in a special 2006 issue of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta dedicated to Larry Haskin.
