Kent Taylor, PhD is Laboratory Operations Director of the General Clinical Research Center's Phenotyping/Genotyping Laboratory at Cedars-Sinai. Dr. Taylor is also a member of the Genetics of Common Diseases Group at Cedars-Sinai's Medical Genetics-Birth Defects Center, and he is an associate professor of pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Dr. Taylor provides genotyping data and bioinformatics support to the Genetics of Common Diseases Group and to various clinical investigators at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He studies the genetics of inflammatory bowel disease as a member of the Immunobiology Center, and he teaches in the Cedars-Sinai/UCLA Intercampus Genetics Program and in training programs for clinical investigators.
Dr. Taylor previously studied the control of gene expression from both the nuclear and mitochondrial genome in early preimplantation mouse development with Dr. Lajos Piko at the research center of the Veterans Administration Hospital in Sepulveda, California. At Cedars-Sinai he continues this interest in the interactions between the mitochondrial and nuclear genome with his studies of the role of mitochondrial mutations in Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) within the Hispanic population of Los Angeles.
In addition to mitochondria, Dr. Taylor's research interests include gene identification in complex genetic traits, including T2DM, hypertension, coronary artery disease, inflammatory bowel disease and keratoconus, as well as pharmacogenetics - studying how genetic changes affect drug response.
Dr. Taylor earned his doctorate in molecular biology from University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles.
