Lawrence A. Taylor

Lawrence August Taylor (September 14, 1938 – September 18, 2017) 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”

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”

Education and early academic career (1958–1973) In 1958, Taylor left New York state “one step ahead of the law"

Works Taylor led a prolific 46-year career with more than 100 articles published in science journals including:

Nature Earth and Planetary Science Letters Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta Meteoritics and Planetary Science Planetary and Space Science Lithos Acta Astronautica Polar Science Current Science.

In 2005, Taylor met with S. Ross Taylor and G. Jeffrey Taylor in the Gatlinburg, Tennessee Meteorological 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.