About the Dean
Cyrus C. Taylor, PhD, is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and the Albert A. Michelson Professor in Physics at Case Western Reserve University. He joined the CWRU faculty in 1988 and was chair of the physics department from 2005 until he was appointed dean in 2006.
Taylor's university service as an administrator began soon after he arrived on campus. He served as chair of the Undergraduate Admissions Committee from 1989 to 1995. He has been a member of the Faculty Senate, chair of the Senate's Budget Committee and a member of the SAGES Implementation Task Force. He has also served as a member of the Steering Committee of the Academic Careers in Engineering & Science (ACES) program. Funded by the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE program, ACES promotes the full participation of women at all levels of faculty and academic leadership. Case Western Reserve was the first private university to receive support from ADVANCE.
Taylor earned his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A former
Truman Scholar, Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow and John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, he has published more than 60 papers and given more than 70 invited talks in recent years.
Taylor has worked in both theoretical and experimental high-energy physics, serving as co-spokesman of the MiniMax collaboration (FNAL T-864) at Fermilab and as co-spokesman of the FELIX collaboration at CERN.
Taylor is well known for his leadership in creating innovative programs aimed at empowering scientists as entrepreneurs. He created and directed the Physics Entrepreneurship Program (PEP), and later helped expand it to include other science departments. Today, the internationally known Science, Technology and Entrepreneurship Program (STEP) includes Biology/Biotechnology, Chemistry and Mathematics as well as Physics.
For providing a new paradigm for graduate education in physics, Taylor was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2002. The following year, he was awarded the prestigious Price Institute Innovative Entrepreneurship Educators Award, presented by the Stanford Roundtable on Entrepreneurship Education.