Michael D. Taylor, MD, PhD, is a paediatric neurosurgeon at Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) and a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics – Hematology/Oncology and Neurosurgery, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston. He is also the Director of the Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Research Program at TCH and a CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research.

His research centers on the molecular genetics of medulloblastoma and ependymoma, two of the most common malignant paediatric brain tumours. He has published over 450 peer-reviewed publications, many in high-impact journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, Cancer Cell, and Lancet Oncology.

His publications have been cited over 64,000 times and his findings adopted to improve clinical practice. His group demonstrated that medulloblastoma comprises at least four distinct diseases (Journal Clin. Oncol., 2012; Cancer Cell, 2017; Nature, 2017) and that there is clinically significant heterogeneity in metastatic medulloblastomas (Nature, 2012, 2016; Nature Genetics, 2017).

His team showed that cerebellar tumours are a disorder of early brain development (Nature, 2019; Nature, 2022: Cell, 2024), that CAR-T-cells are an effective pre-clinical treatment for Group 3 medulloblastoma and PFA ependymomas (Nature Medicine, 2020) and that PFA ependymomas have a unique metabolic program which leads to a phenotype that appears to be unique among mammalian cells (Cell, 2020).