Larry Taylor (geochemist)

Lawrence August Taylor (September 14, 1938 – September 18, 2017) was an American geochemist and petrologist working at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the University of Tennessee. He is the founder of the UT Planetary Geosciences Institute and was also its director until late 2017.

Taylor was a graduate of the Indiana University at Bloomington, where he obtained a bachelor's degree in chemistry and a master's degree in geology. He would move on to receive a PhD from Lehigh University, perform pre-doctoral experimental petrology research at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and finally a Fulbright Fellowship at the Max-Planck-Institüt für Kernphysik in Heidelberg, Germany.^[1]

In December 1972, Taylor was offered to be in the “back room”^[1] of Johnson Space Center during the Apollo 17 mission where he had the opportunity to directly advise astronauts on their extravehicular activities on the Moon. Subsequently, Taylor became very close friends with Harrison Schmitt, the last man to step on the lunar surface and the sole geologist to ever reach the Moon. The two would collaborate throughout their careers with Schmitt playing an influential role in helping Taylor develop the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UT.^[2]

In 1973, after 2 years of being an assistant professor at Purdue University, Taylor would arrive at the University of Tennessee, near the very beginning of the institution's dive into research. Taylor would remain at the University of Tennessee for the latter half of his life and become “one of the true giants in the field”^[1] of lunar science and the director of the University of Tennessee's department of earth and planetary sciences until his retirement in 2017.