Taylor was a botanist, and the first woman to earn a science PhD from Fordham University. Her research area was plant photomorphogenesis. She was head of the Botany Department at Howard University from 1947 until her retirement in 1976
16 February 1911
28 December 1990
USA
Her mother was Welsh and her father was Jamaican
1933 – BSc Howard University
1935 – MSc Howard University (Botany)
1941 – PhD at Fordham University – first woman to obtain a science doctorate at Fordham
1945 – Became Chair of the Botany Department at Howard University
Taylor was born in Sharpsburg Pennsylvania. She attended Dunbar High School in Washington D.C. from where she graduated in 1929. Little more is known of her personal life.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s Taylor taught at Cardozo High School. She taught high school science teachers new teaching methods at summer science schools for the National Science Foundation, such as studying cells under light microscopes. She left to join the war effort in 1942,
when she served in New Guinea for the Army Red Cross.
She advocated for the use of botanicals in high school biology classes because plants were affordable materials for demonstrating biological processes. In the mid-1960s, President Lyndon B Johnson enlisted Taylor to consult in the USA and abroad, thus expanding the NSF program to teachers around the world.
Whilst serving in New Guinea, she met Richard Taylor and they married on 1 Jan 1948. They had one son, Duane, born in 1950, and a daughter Alice. They had two grandchildren. Richard died in 1986.
Taylor was a member of the All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Taylor
Credits (where info sourced from)
https://www.wowstem.org/post/marie-clark-taylor
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1991/01/15/obituaries/51286562-d317-4129-a633-da979ba6b46d/
