Edward C. Taylor, Ph.D. Edward C. Taylor, Ph.D. 
Prof. Edward C. Taylor was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on August 3, 1923. He received both his B.A. (1946) and his Ph.D. (1949) degrees from Cornell University. He was a Merck Postdoctoral Fellow (1949-50) of the National Academy of Sciences in Zürich, Switzerland, where he studied with Leopold Ruzicka, and then the du Pont Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois (1950-51). He joined the faculty at the University of Illinois in 1951, and then moved to Princeton University in 1954. In 1966 he was appointed A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Organic Chemistry, a position he held until July, 1997, when he was appointed A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Organic Chemistry Emeritus and Senior Research Scientist at Princeton. He served as Chairman of the department from 1973 until 1979. He was awarded an Hon. D.Sc. degree from Hamilton College in 1968, the Distinguished Hamilton Award in 1978, and the Hamilton Distinguished Alumni Award in the fall of 1990.
Taylor was an NSF Senior Faculty Fellow at Harvard University, Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Buffalo; Visiting Professor at the Technische Hochschule, Stuttgart, the University of East Anglia, Norwich, and the Weizmann Institute; and Backer Lecturer at the University of Groningen. He is a former member of the Chemistry Advisory Committee of the Cancer Chemotherapy National Service Center, of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and of the Board of Editors of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry and the Journal of Organic Chemistry; he is currently a member of the Board of Editors of Synthetic Communications, Heterocycles, Pteridines, and Advances in Heterocyclic Chemistry, and a member of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Medicinal Chemistry at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. He served as Chairman of the Organic Division of the American Chemical Society in 1976-77.
His other honors include Fulbright, Guggenheim and Alexander von Humboldt awards, the 1974 American Chemical Society Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry (for his work in organothallium, heterocyclic, pteridine and folate chemistry), the 5th International Award in Heterocyclic Chemistry, Gowland Hopkins Medal in 1993, the 1994 Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award of the American Chemical Society, and the 2004 Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award for Invention (for the compound that became the Lilly cancer drug Alimta). Taylor is editorial advisor in the field of organic chemistry to John Wiley & Sons and a member of the ACS, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker, Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, and Sigma Xi, and a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemists, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the AAAS.
In 1968 he joined Dr. Arnold Weissberger as co-editor of the Wiley-Interscience series The Chemistry of Heterocyclic Compounds (Taylor has been the sole editor since Dr. Weissberger's death in 1984), and of the series General Heterocyclic Chemistry. Thus far 77 volumes have been published under his editorship. Prof. Peter Wipf joined him as co-editor in late 1997. Taylor has produced a 24-hour Film Course on Principles of Heterocyclic Chemistry, and a companion Audio Course, both distributed by the American Chemical Society; these have been followed recently by an extensive lecture course aimed at industrial research laboratories on Utilization of Heterocycles in Organic Synthesis. He is also the editor of Advances in Organic Chemistry (9 volumes to date) and was co-editor with Pfleiderer of Pteridine Chemistry (1964), co-author (with Alexander McKillop) of The Chemistry of Enaminonitriles and o-Aminonitriles (1970), and author of two books on Principles of Heterocyclic Chemistry.
Prof. Taylor is the author of over 450 scientific papers and 50 U.S. patents on heterocyclic chemistry, organothallium chemistry, natural product chemistry, medicinal chemistry and synthetic methodology.
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