Rate My Professor Michael Taylor

Dr. Michael Taylor is an academic in the Department of Physics at the University of Otago, specializing in biophotonics, quantum metrology, and quantum-enhanced microscopy applied to biological systems. He holds a PhD from the University of Queensland in the School of Biomedical Sciences. His career trajectory includes serving as a Research Assistant in the University of Otago Department of Physics from February 2009 to January 2010, followed by postdoctoral positions at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria (March 2015 to September 2016), and as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Queensland (October 2016 onward), before taking up his current role at Otago. Taylor is affiliated with the Dodd-Walls Centre for Photonic Innovation and actively supervises postgraduate research.

Taylor's research focuses on advancing optical technologies for biological measurement beyond classical limits, including optical tweezers, structured light scattering, Brillouin microscopy for non-contact 3D characterization of cellular stiffness, and resonant-enhanced nonlinear optics. He leads the development of Brillouin scattering microscopy for cellular biomechanics, involving beam shaping to overcome scattering limitations, signal processing for noisy data, and validation on bioprinted tissues in collaboration with Professor Tim Woodfield at the University of Otago Christchurch and Professor Warwick Bowen at the University of Queensland. In 2024, he secured a Marsden Fund grant of $942,000 for a project titled "Improving the technology used to measure abnormal stiffness in cells by using sculpted light at a microscopic scale." He also supervises PhD projects on resonant enhanced nonlinear and quantum optics, enabling efficient light color conversion at low powers. His seminal publications include "Biological measurement beyond the quantum limit" (Nature Photonics, 2013), "Quantum metrology and its application in biology" (Physics Reports, 2016), "Quantum-enhanced nonlinear microscopy" (Nature, 2021), "Evanescent single-molecule biosensing with quantum-limited precision" (Nature Photonics, 2017), and "Subdiffraction-Limited Quantum Imaging within a Living Cell" (Physical Review X, 2014), amassing over 3,000 citations and demonstrating substantial impact in quantum sensing for biology, microrheology, and neural imaging in model organisms like zebrafish.