New Provost Jaime Taylor, a physicist who has worked with NASA and the U.S. Army, is focused on helping Marshall reach lofty new heights.
He’s been involved with the NASA space program, helped Army researchers design a computer program to identify enemy tanks and has had a long and distinguished academic career. Now Dr. Jaime (pronounced “Hi-me”) R. Taylor is Marshall University’s new provost and senior vice president for academic affairs.
Taylor comes to Marshall from Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, where he was dean of the College of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
“Jaime Taylor is an outstanding addition to our team at Marshall,” said President Jerome A. Gilbert. “He hit the ground running by reaching out to our faculty and other key stakeholders to ascertain our academic strengths and weaknesses. We will use this information to build upon Marshall’s tradition of delivering academic excellence. I’m excited he’s here.”
Taylor served as dean at Austin Peay since 2008, except for 2013 to 2015, when he served as the institution’s interim provost and vice president for academic affairs. Last year, he was on temporary leave from the dean’s position to serve as Austin Peay’s first Presidential Fellow, conducting research and working directly with the university president on strategy and policy related to Tennessee’s formula funding model for higher education.
As dean, Taylor worked with department chairs to add new degree programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. He also led initiatives to increase enrollment and improve student success, resulting in a more than doubling of the number of graduates in the college.
While interim provost, he established two programs — an out-of-state scholarship and a guaranteed community college graduate scholarship — that were later replicated by other universities in the state. After the first year of using recruitment strategies put in place while Taylor was interim provost, Austin Peay State University experienced record growth of more than 30 percent in its freshman class.
Prior to his appointment as dean, Taylor chaired the university’s Department of Physics and Astronomy from 2000 to 2008.
Growing up, Taylor’s father was in the U.S. Air Force, which meant the family bounced around quite a bit. Jaime was born in Spain, and that is how he acquired such a unique first name.
“My mother loved bullfighting, so she named me after a famous bullfighter, Jaime Ostos,” he explained. “I was only in Spain for the first three months of my life. When we returned to the states, my father was stationed in North Dakota for one year, then he went to Vietnam. My family, which includes two brothers and a sister, spent that year in Pennsylvania. My father’s last posting before he retired from the Air Force was at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, which is right outside Clarksville, Tennessee.”
Taylor joined the Austin Peay faculty in 1995, after earning a B.S. in physics and mathematics from Austin Peay (1990), and an M.S. (1991) and a Ph.D. (1995) in engineering science from the University of Tennessee Space Institute.
“During my last year of graduate school, Austin Peay Department Chair Robert Sears, who was like a father to me, encouraged me to apply for a position at Austin Peay,” Taylor said. “Being a professor was not the direction I was looking for in life at the time. I had my eye on working for NASA. But Dr. Sears really turned me on to teaching. I discovered I truly loved working with students. I enjoy taking somebody like me, a rural student, and help expose them to the entire world, and show them that they can compete with anybody in the world.”
Taylor’s research interests are in applications of biologically-inspired algorithms or “soft computing” methods such as neural networks, fuzzy systems and genetic algorithms.
In addition to his longtime career at Austin Peay, Taylor was able to realize his dream of being involved with NASA. During the summers of 1996, 1997, 2001 and 2002, he served as a NASA Faculty Fellow at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. College and university professors selected for the elite program have the opportunity to conduct research on site at the Space Flight Center.
Taylor also has conducted research at the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville.
“I worked with the Army in helping them recognize tanks on the battlefield,” he explained. “People working in artificial intelligence started getting interested in what’s called ‘soft computing,’ creating biologically-inspired algorithms that work like the human mind. This became an area I was very interested in.”
Taylor said he loved Austin Peay and could never have imagined leaving. “If you had asked me a year ago if I would ever leave there, I would have said ‘no way.’ But some time ago, I met Dr. Gilbert. I was very impressed by him and started following his career. When I saw there was this opening at Marshall, I decided to take a chance and submit my resume.”
Taylor succeeds Dr. Gayle Ormiston, who stepped down in order to go back to being a faculty member in the philosophy department.
The new provost and his wife, Stacy, who have a grown son and daughter, are making their home in downtown Huntington’s historic West Virginia Building.
“I feel ridiculously fortunate to be at Marshall University,” Taylor said. “President Gilbert has high aspirations for Marshall and the Huntington community, and there are several things he wants to see happen to help make those aspirations a reality. I know he not only wants to grow enrollment but, at the same time, help more students succeed and get their diplomas. The confidence I have that President Gilbert’s vision will be realized continues to grow as I learn more about the campus community and the city of Huntington. There are so many good things going on at Marshall, and I’m excited to be part of it.”
James E. Casto, retired associate editor of The Herald-Dispatch, is the author of a number of books on local and regional history. His latest is Huntington Chronicles (The History Press, $21.99), which offers capsule accounts of many of the noteworthy people, places and events in the city’s history.
Photos (From second from top):
Taylor helped U.S. Army researchers design a computer program to identify enemy tanks on the battlefield.
Kicking off the new school year, Marco and Taylor pose for a quick photo at the annual Herd Rally in Pullman Square.
From left: Marshall Men’s Basketball Coach Dan D’Antoni, Dr. Jaime Taylor and Houston Rockets Head Coach and Marshall alumnus Mike D’Antoni.