Washington "Wati" Taylor

Washington Taylor is a Professor of Physics in the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP). Taylor received his BA in mathematics from Stanford, and his PhD in physics from UC-Berkeley in 1993. He came to MIT as a postdoc in the CTP in 1993. Taylor joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1995, and returned to MIT in 1998, where he became a full professor in 2002. Taylor served as the Director of MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics from 2016-2018.

Taylor teaches undergraduate and graduate courses ranging from electromagnetism to quantum field theory. With Prof. Robert Jaffe, Taylor developed a new course on the Physics of Energy [8.21]. This course, which has been taught each Fall since 2008, is aimed at MIT undergraduates in any major. The course introduces students to the basic physical principles underlying the energy landscape, as well as applications of these principles to energy sources, uses and conversions. In 2018, Jaffe and Taylor completed a book “The Physics of Energy”, based on material from the course.