Andre Taylor

André Taylor is an American scientist who is an associate professor of chemical engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. Taylor works on novel materials for energy conversion and storage. He was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2010, and named as one of The Community of Scholars' Most Influential Black Researchers of 2020.

Early life and education Taylor attended Smith-Cotton High School in Missouri. As a high school student he spent a year as an exchange student in Spain. He played basketball and soccer, and was a National Merit Scholar and member of the National Honor Society.

Research and career Taylor led the Transformative Materials and Devices research laboratory at Yale University where he developed new materials for energy conversion. There he focused on carbon-based solar cells that made used of small molecule and polymer semiconductors.

Taylor joined the New York University Tandon School of Engineering in 2018, where continued to develop materials and devices for energy conversion, with a particular focus on perovskite solar cells. He and his colleagues developed a scalable process that is suitable for manufacturing solar panels on a large scale with high reproducibility.

Alongside electron transport layers, Taylor has studied electromagnetic interference (EMI) blocking films, which limits damage to smartphones and other wearable technologies. The films consist of MXenes, two-dimensional transition metal carbides that are highly conductive and the ability to shield from electromagnetic interference.

Taylor has worked on electrochemical fuel cells and batteries. In lithium-ion batteries, the electrodes are typically composed of two-dimensional nanosheets, with the anodes (negative electrodes) made from graphitic carbon nitride. Unfortunately, whilst graphitic carbon nitride are low-cost and scalable, they have poor conductivity and are poor storage capacity for sodium-ions, meaning they cannot simply be used for sodium-ion batteries. 2010 National Science Foundation CAREER Award 2011 Yale Greer Memorial Prize 2020 The Community of Scholars Most Inspiring Black scientists in America

Selected publications Zheng, Y., Kong, J., Huang, D., Shi, W., McMillon-Brown, L., Katz, H. E.... & Taylor, A. D. (2018). Spray coating of the PCBM electron transport layer significantly improves the efficiency of pin planar perovskite solar cells. Nanoscale, 10(24), 11342–11348. doi: doi.org/10.1039/C8NR01763H

Personal life