Baptist Golden Triangle Chief Medical Officer Dr. Jack Reed and his clinical team visited with Dr. Doris Taylor, Ph.D., FACC, FAHA, a globally recognized researcher credited with a number of important scientific breakthroughs related to cell therapy, stem cell biology and tissue engineering-based therapies. Dr. Taylor is a native of Lowndes County, Miss.
Dr. Taylor presented Grand Rounds to physicians, clinicians and other staff at Baptist Golden Triangle in late February. She discussed her research in using stem cells to treat heart disease and her team’s efforts to build a biological heart in the laboratory. Dr. Taylor is a native of Steens, Miss., and currently directs both the Regenerative Medicine Research Department at Texas Heart Institute (THI) in Houston and the Center for Cell and Organ Biotechnology at THI and Texas A&M University. She was in Columbus as keynote speaker at the II&C Symposium at Mississippi University for Women on Feb. 23 and 24. She is a 1977 graduate of MUW.
She holds faculty appointments at both Texas A&M and Rice University and is a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology, American Heart Association and the Council on Functional Genomics and Translational Biology, among others.
Dr. Taylor earned her B.S. from Mississippi University for Women in Biology and Physical Sciences in 1977 and earned her Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas in 1987. During her post-doctoral studies at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, she first worked with regenerative medicine strategies, growing heart muscle cells in the laboratory and working on gene therapy projects.
Before joining THI, Dr. Taylor directed the Center for Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota. She also held academic appointments as the Medtronic Bakken Chair of Integrative Biology and Physiology and Professor of Medicine. Dr. Taylor came to the University of Minnesota from Duke University Medical School, where she was on the faculty from 1991 to 2007 and described the first ever functional repair of an injured heart with stem cells.
