Biography

 

Peter Taylor was born in England and lived there until 1965, when his family emigrated to Australia. He completed high school and university studies in Sydney, and then spent three years in Sweden and Germany before taking up a position in Melbourne with CSIRO. In 1985 he moved to California to work at NASA Ames Research Center.  After several years, he was recruited to San Diego at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), where he became deputy director, as well as a Professor of Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego. During his time at SDSC, he also served as Chief Applications Scientist of the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, a multi-institutional collaboration in the USA. From 2002-2010, Peter held the Royal Society Wolfson Professorship of Chemistry at the University of Warick in the UK, while in his role as Chief Scientist at the Centre for Scientific Computing (CSC). Peter was recently appointed (July 2010) as the Director of the University of Melbourne led Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative (VLSCI).  He also holds an adjunct appointment in the School of Chemistry at the University of Melbourne.

 

An internationally recognized computational scientist, Peter has a strong record in research, his speciality of interest being in the development and application of methods for highly accurate calculations of molecular properties.  Peter has nearly 250 scientific peer-reviewed papers, with an impressive h-index of 54.  The three papers included on the research highlights of this web site include 1) his most highly cited article (Roos, B.O.; Taylor, P.R., Siegbahn, P. E.M., A Complete Active Space SCF Method (CASSCF) using a Density-Matrix Formulated Super-CI Approach, Chem. Phys., 1980, 48, 157-173) with nearly 1400 citations, 2), his very first paper with his first mentor, N.S. Hush, in 1976 (J.K. Beattie, N.H. Hush, and P.R. Taylor, Electron delocaliazation in the mixed-valence m-pyrazine-decaamminediruthenium (5+) ion, Inorg. Chem., 1976, 992), and 3) his most recent paper published last year (X. Huang, P.R.Taylor, and T. J. Lee, Highly Accurate Quartic Force Fields, Vibrational Frequencies, and Spectroscopic Constants for cyclic and Linear C­3H3+,  J. Phys. Chem. A, 2011, asap).  Peter has been an outstanding teacher, mentor, and collaborator, and this special event dedicated to him will feature talks from many of the people so appreciative of knowing and working with him!