Washington Taylor

Washington Taylor is a Professor of Physics at MIT. Taylor received his B.A. in mathematics from Stanford, and his Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley in 1993. After a postdoc at MIT, Taylor joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1995, and returned to MIT in 1998, where he became a full professor in 2002. Taylor has served as the Director of MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics from 2016-2018, and again 2024-present.

Taylor’s research in high-energy theory has centered on basic theoretical questions related to quantum physics and gravity, in particular on the problems of finding a nonperturbative, background-independent formulation of string theory, and connecting string theory to observable physics. Taylor has also recently begun to engage in research on mathematical and computational models of ecology and evolution.

Taylor has been extensively involved in education and policy work related to energy and climate. With Prof. Robert Jaffe, Taylor developed a new MIT course on the Physics of Energy, which has been taught each Fall since 2008. In 2018, Jaffe and Taylor completed an award-winning textbook “The Physics of Energy”, published by Cambridge University Press, based on material from the course. Taylor served as a member of the American Physical Society Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) from 2021-2023.