John Taylor is a mycologist with four decades of experience in phylogenetics and the evolutionary biology of fungi. He is professor of the graduate division at Berkeley and a principal investigator on projects investigating the ecology of Coccidioides immitis, the agent of the human fungal disease coccidioidomycosis (also known as Valley Fever). He is also interested in the role of fungal communities in drought tolerance in the globally important cereal crop plant Sorghum bicolor, and is researching the role of microbes in allergy by developing better and more economical approaches to sampling indoor air.