Professor Taylor is awarded for seminal contributions to the development of ultrashort pulse lasers and applications to nonlinear fiber optics.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Photonics Society Quantum Electronics Award is given to honour an individual (or group of individuals) for outstanding technical contributions to quantum electronics, either in fundamentals or applications, or both.

The Award consists of an honorarium of $4000 and a medal. The presentation is made at the IEEE Photonics Conference.

From the IEEE:

Professor Taylor received his PhD from the Queen's University of Belfast (QUB) in 1974 for laser research carried out at QUB and Imperial. He returned to Imperial in 1976 and established the Femtosecond Optics Group in1986.

He is widely acknowledged for his influential basic research and development of diverse lasers systems and their application. He has contributed extensively to advances in picosecond and femtosecond dye laser technology, compact diode-laser and fibre-laser-pumped vibronic lasers and their wide-ranging application to fundamental studies, such as time-resolved photophysics of resonant energy transfer and relaxation pathways of biological probes and organic saturable absorbers.

Professor Taylor is also particularly noted for his fundamental studies of ultrafast nonlinear optics in fibers, with emphasis on solitons, their amplification, the role of noise, and self-effects, such as Raman gain.

He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and of the Royal Society, London. He has published over 400 scientific papers, co-authored a book on lasers for schoolchildren and edited/co-edited two research text books on solitons and fibre based spercontinua.

Professor Taylor's many and varied contributions have been recognized by the Ernst Abbé Award of the Carl Zeiss Foundation, the Thomas Young Medal of the Institute of Physics, the Oxburgh Medal of the Institute of Measurement and the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society.