Donald H. Taylor Jr.

Don Taylor is a health policy scholar who has studied rural health, identification of underserved areas, and the economics of smoking and cessation. For the past 20 years his work has focused on how society cares for the elderly and to what effect on individuals, families, public programs and inter-generational wealth. More recently he has focused on archival research methods that help to illustrate the role of Race in our history—individual, institutional, national. An emerging interest is consideration of how visual art and fiction might be more effective at making inequality of various types unacceptable culturally in a way that is more effective than data based and more traditional public policy-based appeals. All three of his degrees (Ph.D., Public Health, Health Policy and Management, 1995) are from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Taylor serves as the Director of the Social Science Research Institute (since 2019) and served two years as the elected leader of the Duke Faculty in the role of the Chair of the Academic Council (2017-19).