Carl S. Taylor is Director of Community and Youth Development Programs at the Institute for Children, Youth and Families and Professor of Family and Child Ecology at Michigan State University. Dr. Taylor has extensive experience in field research aimed at the reduction of violence involving American youth. He has taught in the school of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University and at Grand Valley State University. Dr. Taylor has directed the Department of Criminal Justice and Public Safety at Jackson Community College, served as a clinical professor to the Grand Valley State University Criminal Justice and Police Academy and as an associate of the National Community Policing Center. Professor Taylor has worked with communities, foundations and government agencies in understanding gangs, youth culture, and violence. Some of the organizations that Dr. Taylor has worked with include the Guggenheim Foundation, the C.S. Mott Foundation, the FBI Academy, and the Children's Defense Fund. Currently he is the principal investigator in the newly launched Michigan Gang Research Project. Dr. Taylor also serves on the Michigan Juvenile Justice Committee and advises various projects concerning youth throughout America.

Dr. Taylor has established a national reputation as an ethnographer, and takes pride in having worked in some of the most isolated and distressed communities in the nation. As a criminologist and ecologist, his merging of the two disciplines has given him a unique viewpoint on emerging social issues.

Having conducted research projects in Detroit over the last two decades, Dr. Taylor has a strong understanding of the problems facing many neighborhoods in urban America. Two projects, involving urban gangs, have resulted in two books that summarize the up- close impact of violence on communities: Dangerous Society (1990), Girls, Gangs, Women, and Drugs (1993), both published by Michigan State University Press, and Jugendkulturen und Gangs (Youth Culture and Gangs) (1998), published in Germany.

An advocate for investing in human capital, Taylor believes that early in investment, intervention and education create strong homes and families, and communities. The lesson from his family and earlier childhood, have impressed upon him the necessity to give back to society. The sense of balance is crucial in his work. Scholarship, must include reaching out to communities, local and global. Professor Taylor values the classroom on campus, and extends that classroom into communities.