Biography

Dr. William Taylor, Associate Professor of Population Medicine and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS), has served as director of the BWH Residency Program in Primary Care and Population Medicine since 2006, after directing the prevention/ clinical epidemiology component since the program’s inception 20 years ago. Dr. Taylor has practiced primary care medicine for three decades, and has served as Associate Master of the William B. Castle Society at HMS since 1997. Dr. Taylor earned his B.A. from Yale, and his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He completed his post-graduate training in Medicine at Boston City Hospital as a member of the Primary Care Graduate Training Program. As part of the core faculty that developed Harvard’s New Pathway Program in 1985, Dr. Taylor led the integration of prevention into the new curriculum. He later served in numerous teaching roles at HMS, including developer and initial director of the required course in Clinical Epidemiology, acting course director for Preventive Medicine and Nutrition, and senior fellow for Patient-Doctor I, the basic interviewing course. He served as course director for Patient-Doctor II, the physical diagnosis course, from 2001 to 2008. He has been an associate firm chief, preceptor for primary care residents, inpatient attending physician, and teacher of third-year students in office practice at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), and attends on the inpatient medical service at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He co-directed the Fellow-as-Educator program in Harvard’s general medicine and general pediatrics fellowship programs. He was an inaugural associate director of HMS’s continuing medical education course in “Primary Care Internal Medicine: Principles and Practice” and served in that role for 26 years. Dr. Taylor served on the Internal Medicine Certifying Examination Writing Committee of the American Board of Internal Medicine. He was a Kellogg National Fellow and a Rabkin Fellow in Medical Education at the Shapiro Institute for Education and Research at BIDMC, and served as an associate editor of Journal Watch. He earned the “Humanism in Medicine” award from HMS, served as Harvard’s LCME faculty fellow for medical school accreditation, and was a finalist for the Massachusetts “Compassionate Caregiver” award from the Schwartz Center at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Taylor has published papers on primary care, medical education, clinical epidemiology, medical interviewing, patient-doctor relationship, decision analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, tuberculosis prevention, cancer screening, diagnosing diabetes, and cholesterol reduction. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and the American College of Preventive Medicine.