David Taylor is an Associate Professor and an American Cancer Society Research Scholar in the Department of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Texas at Austin. There, he is the Director of the Sauer Structural Biology Laboratory and a member the Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology and the LIVESTRONG Cancer Institutes at Dell Medical School. David received his B.S. in Biochemistry summa cum laude from Syracuse University in 2008. He completed his Ph.D. with distinction in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University in 2013. In 2014, he joined the laboratories of Jennifer A. Doudna and Eva Nogales at the University of California, Berkeley as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Research in his laboratory is focused on understanding the structure and function of macromolecular machines using cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). There are three specific avenues of investigation: (1) mechanisms of RNA-guided CRISPR-Cas surveillance (2) methods to solve structures of human complexes in a highly parallel manner, and (3) understanding nucleic acid processing machines, including ribosomes and RNA polymerases.