Michael D. Taylor, MD, PhD, is a pediatric neurosurgeon at Texas Children's Hospital (TCH) and a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics – Hematology/Oncology and Neurosurgery, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston. He is also the Director of the Pediatric Brain Tumor Research Program at TCH and a CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research.

Born and raised in Canada, Dr. Taylor attended The University of Western Ontario and earned his medical degree in 1994. His education and training continued at the University of Toronto, where he earned his Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics in 2002, and his residency training in Neurosurgery in 2003. Dr. Taylor then won a Detweiler Traveling Fellowship from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada for fellowship training in pediatric neurosurgery and pediatric neuro-oncology at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, TN, where he completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Cancer Genomics in the Department of Developmental Neurobiology.

His research centers on the molecular genetics of medulloblastoma and ependymoma, two of the most common malignant paediatric brain tumours. He has published over 450 peer-reviewed publications, many in high-impact journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, Cancer Cell, and Lancet Oncology. His publications have been cited over 74,000 times and his findings adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO) to improve clinical practice globally. His group demonstrated that medulloblastoma comprises at least four distinct diseases and that there is clinically significant heterogeneity in metastatic medulloblastomas. His team showed that cerebellar tumours are a disorder of early brain development, and that CAR-T-cells are an effective pre-clinical treatment for Group 3 medulloblastoma and PFA ependymomas. Research from his team also showed that PFA ependymomas have a metabolic program which leads to a phenotype that appears to be unique among mammalian cells and that PFA have a distinct 3D genome.