About

I’m Jordan Taylor, and I’m currently a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh. I spent several years prior to this working in biochemistry/immunology research labs, specializing in “innate” immune signalling networks. My PhD work has been focused on a family of proteins called IFITMs, which block virus entry into cells. I have been investigating strands of evidence suggesting these proteins may also play roles in inflammatory processes and cancer. I am currently writing my thesis (as of July 2024, aiming for submission in September) and will hopefully have more to share publicly about my research in the near future.

Away from the bench, I’ve worked as a data science intern in a quantitative human genetics lab (also at UoE). Here, I worked on modelling phenotypes from sparse genotype data. In particular, I was able to show that the omission of gene-gene interaction (epistatic) terms from so-called “polygenic score” models has minimal impact on their predictive accuracy, even if the underlying genetic architecture is implausibly epistatic.

I also have several side projects I’ve been working on in various stages of incompleteness (this website among them) which can be found around my site or on my GitHub. I’m currently self-hosting this site and my dashboards on my multi-purpose home server, so things might be a bit slow if, for example, my wife and I happen to be watching something on Plex as you are accessing it. Upgrading my server and becoming a full on homelab geek is an aspiration of mine, but I’m not quite there yet.