Professor Joseph Taylor, an American, is the James McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Physics at Princeton University and works in the field of radio astronomy. He co-discovered the first binary pulsar and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1993.

He has been Professor of Physics at Princeton since 1980, and served as Dean of the Faculty there from 1997 to 2003. He taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, from 1969 to 1980.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Physical Society. He was co-chair of the National Research Council's Decade Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics from 1999 to 2002. He earned his BA degree with honors in physics from Haverford College and his Ph.D. degree in Astronomy from Harvard University.

Professor Taylor has received numerous awards including the Dannie Heineman Prize of the American Astronomical Society and American Institute of Physics, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wolf Prize in Physics.