At 34, Taylor is on the young side for a principal investigator, or P.I. — the lead researcher of a project or lab. Top scientists at Fred Hutch’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division, or VIDD, already considered him a rising star in immunology when they recruited him in the spring of 2014 to open his own lab. This is the story of how a young scientist makes the leap from being a postdoctoral fellow in someone else’s lab to being the P.I. of his own at a time when science itself is facing funding hurdles.

‘You want to set the course a little broader’

A lot of people go to graduate school in the sciences knowing they want to some day run their own lab. Taylor wasn’t one of them.

The second-oldest of six, he grew up in New York state, the son of a truck driver who moved bales of hay between farms and a nurse who, when her kids got older, went back to work on the overnight shift at the local emergency room. His father taught him to sweat — and advised him: “Stay in college.” His mother, as unflappable tending her son’s broken arm at a baseball game as she was in the ER, modeled calm.

He didn’t know what he wanted to do until his junior year at New Jersey’s Rider University, when his biology professor turned a small class of just five students into an immunology lab running real research experiments. Taylor was hooked.

“I’d never thought about science as a means to learn things because it was never taught that way,” he said. “When thinking about a question, you do reading, see if anybody knows the answer, and if not, you design an experiment.”

Over the next six years as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania and then five more as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota, Taylor spent most of his time in a lab — coming up with questions, designing experiments and developing powerful techniques that led to publication in two top scientific journals and a job at Fred Hutch.

By the time he was wrapping up his postdoc, he decided that he had more ideas — more questions — than he could answer alone. That’s when he started to think about his own lab.

“You want to take on the responsibility, to set the course a little broader,” he said.

Taylor’s research focuses on B-cell immunology, a type of white blood cell responsible for producing antibodies. He works with so-called naïve B cells — ones that haven’t yet been exposed to, and thus triggered by, the foreign or abnormal molecule for which they are specific. A few of these naïve B cells, so elusive he calls them “a kind of dark matter of cells,” are capable of protecting a person against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Rare as they are, everybody has them. They just have to be “trained” by a vaccine to protect against HIV. And to be trained, they have to first bind to the vaccine.

As a postdoc, Taylor developed an innovative laboratory technique using metallic additives and magnets to test experimental vaccines to see which B cells bind to them. His approach allows researchers to quickly screen dozens, even hundreds, of vaccine candidates in the lab and — without having to inject a single person — throw out the ones that don’t have a chance of working. Since coming to Fred Hutch, he has been working with Dr. Leo Stamatatos and other top researchers on HIV, but as his small, four-person lab grows, he wants to expand to include other infections for which a vaccine doesn’t exist.

“He is doing great, exciting work,” said VIDD Director Dr. Julie McElrath, who is a top HIV researcher herself and who recruited Taylor. “The HIV field has been looking to apply concepts of basic immunology, particularly B-cell immunology, because B cells bring the antibodies. The tools he has and the insights he has are really important.”

On a recent afternoon in his laboratory looking out at the I-5 freeway pillars, Taylor had arranged everything he needed to do that day’s experiment: test tubes in pink and blue plastic racks or nestled in a plastic bucket of ice to keep the cells inside them cold; five pipettes, in different sizes to deliver varying volumes; a plastic bucket to dispose of pipette tips. The protocol — essentially the recipe for the experiment, the product of careful design and testing — was clipped to the hood of the biosafety cabinet.

Calm, focused, confident, Taylor is a natural at the bench. But these days, he’s lucky to be in the lab doing experiments one day a week — a goal he doesn’t always make. He has other responsibilities — like ordering all those test tubes and pipettes, for starters.