Taylor Wilson

Personal life and education Taylor Wilson was born in 1994 in Texarkana, Arkansas to Kenneth and Tiffany Wilson. His father is the owner of a Coca-Cola bottling plant, and his mother was a yoga instructor. Wilson was initially interested in rocketry and space science, before entering the field of nuclear science at age 10, receiving much support from his parents. He resides in Reno, Nevada.

In June 2012, Wilson was awarded a Thiel Fellowship. The two-year $100,000 fellowship requires recipients to forgo college for the duration of the fellowship. In 2017, Wilson was named a member of the Helena Group, a think tank focused on executing projects that improve the world.

Scientific projects

Fusion reactor In 2008, Wilson achieved nuclear fusion that generated a temperature forty times as hot as that of the sun using an inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) device, which was a variation of the fusor that was invented by Philo T. Farnsworth in 1964.

Nuclear detection In May 2010, Wilson entered the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in San Jose, California, and won several awards for his project titled "Fission Vision: The Detection of Prompt and Delayed Induced Fission Gamma Radiation, and the Application to the Detection of Proliferated Nuclear Materials."

In May 2011, Wilson entered his radiation detector in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Los Angeles, California, against a field of 1,500 competitors and won a US$50,000 award. The project, "Countering Nuclear Terrorism: Novel Active and Passive Techniques for Detecting Nuclear Threats", won the First Place Award in the Physics and Astronomy Category, Best of Category Award, and the Intel Young Scientist Award. Wilson stated he hopes to test and rapidly field the devices to US ports for counterterrorism purposes.

In popular culture He is the subject of the biography The Boy Who Played with Fusion, by Tom Clynes, published in 2015, the film rights to which have been optioned by 20th Century Fox.