About

Dr. Warren Taylor was named Professor and Chair of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in March 2026. In this role he is committed to advancing all the academic missions of the Department of Psychiatry, including driving cutting-edge research into the causes of and treatment for mental health disorders, training the next generation of mental health clinicians and researchers, and striving to improve mental health care for North Carolinians.

Dr. Taylor received his medical degree from the University of South Florida College of Medicine. He then migrated to North Carolina, completing his residency training in psychiatry and his geriatric psychiatry fellowship at Duke University. After serving as faculty in the Duke Department of Psychiatry for several years, he joined the Vanderbilt Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. During this period he held the James G. Blakemore Chair in Psychiatry and served in several leadership roles, including the Associate Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Cognitive Medicine, Director of both the Division of Geriatric Psychiatry and Division of General Psychiatry, and later serving as Vice-Chair for Research. He was additionally a physician-investigator at the Geriatric Research, Education, and Clinical Center (GRECC) in the Tennessee Valley VA Health System.

Dr. Taylor is also an accomplished physician-scientist. His research examines neurobiological factors influencing the phenomenology and outcomes of late-life depression using a variety of methods including neuroimaging, ecological assessments, and neurocognitive approaches. This work is integrated with clinical trials designed to probe the biological substrates of the antidepressant response and longitudinal trial designs examining longer-term outcomes such as cognitive decline or vulnerability to recurrence. This includes relating structural and functional neuroimaging with clinical depression outcomes, with a particular focus on the influence of vascular disease on brain aging, cognitive decline, and depression. Current work focuses on identifying targetable factors contributing to the recurrence of depression, contributors of cognitive decline in older adults, and repurposing of drugs to potentially improve late-life depression outcomes.