Herman A. Taylor Jr.

Researchers, churches and local residents built the Jackson Heart Study together. When Herman A. Taylor Jr. became its founding director and principal investigator in 1998, the study set out to examine cardiovascular health among Black adults in and around Jackson, Mississippi, and it grew into the largest and most comprehensive NIH study of heart disease in African Americans. Taylor has emphasized that the achievement belonged to a team. The design depended on the community's willingness to take part.

Taylor grew up near Birmingham, Alabama, during segregation, and he has connected his career's focus to that early landscape. He earned a bachelor's degree in biology at Princeton University in 1976 and his medical degree at Harvard in 1980, along with a master of public health degree. After Harvard, he trained in internal medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before specializing in cardiology. He worked as a National Health Service Corps physician in Miami's Liberty City, caring for patients in a neighborhood with few medical resources, and practiced as a cardiologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

The Jackson Heart Study combined research with community education and training for future clinicians and scientists. That combination reflected Taylor's view that a study built on a community owes the community something in return: knowledge delivered back, and careers opened for the people who live there. During the Jackson years he also held professorships at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

In July 2014, he became director and endowed professor of the Cardiovascular Research Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine. His work there continued to examine heart health and disparities, including a study of how resilience and other factors shape cardiovascular risk. In 2024, the American Heart Association awarded him its Clinical Research Prize, recognizing a career spent studying cardiovascular disease in the population that carries some of its heaviest burden.

After his residency at Chapel Hill, he trained in interventional cardiology. The study enrolled participants from across the Jackson area and followed them over years, generating findings on blood pressure, heart failure and the social conditions that shape them.