Records relating to Pat Taylor

Patricia Elsie Taylor (née Lee) was a microbiologist and research scientist. She was born in the town of Ayr in Queensland, Australia to Ernest Howard Lee Hang Gong and Mayzie Kwong Sue Duk in 1929, the sixth of eleven children. She received her Bachelor of Science from the School of Bacteriology at the University of Queensland in 1952, and her First Class Honours Degree at the University of Queensland in 1954. While completing her Honours Degree, she also worked at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research. In 1958, she accepted a position at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, where she completed her Ph.D. in Bacteriology in 1964. She met Ken Taylor while he was studying for his M.B.A. at Berkeley and the two were married in 1960. They have one son, Douglas Taylor.

Taylor accompanied her husband on his various foreign service postings throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to her responsibilities as a diplomat’s spouse, she continued to work in medical and research institutions in the countries where they were posted, including the Institute of Nutrition for Central America and Panama in Guatemala (1960-1963); the Child Research Centre in Detroit, Michigan (1963-1966); and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London, England (1967-1971). In 1971, the family returned to Ottawa, where Taylor worked at the Bureau of Virology, Health and Welfare. She was also invited to serve on viral committees for the National Institutes of Health in the United States and the World Health Organization in Geneva.

In 1978, while posted to Tehran, Taylor was Senior Consultant in Scientific Research at the Iranian National Blood Transfusion Service while also working at the Institut Pasteur d’Iran. She assisted her husband in hiding the six American diplomats in their residence during the hostage crisis in 1979. She then moved with her family to New York City in 1980, where she worked at the Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute of The New York Blood Center from 1981 until her retirement in 2008. She also served as chair of the Women’s International Advisory Council of International House.

Taylor has held a number of research fellowships and scholarships, including an International Fellowship from the American Association of University Women, and Fulbright and Rockefeller Foundation grants. Her research has been published in several medical journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine, American Journal of Epidemiology, The Journal of Virological Methods, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. She received an honorary degree from St. Francis Xavier University in 1981 and was named “Woman of the Year” by the Canadian Women’s Club in 1992. She was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 1981.

Taylor died in Kanata, Ontario in 2024.