Dr. Taylor Medlock-Lanier, Class of 2020, has spent the last five years in her lab at the University of Georgia surrounded by containers of planarians—tiny flatworms with an extraordinary superpower. Cut one in half, and within a week, it will regrow its missing parts, including its entire brain.
She’s been asking these tiny creatures a very personal question: “How do you do it?” And more importantly: “Can you teach us?”
The inspiration traces back to 2012, when her grandmother was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. In the years since, that experience has shaped her curiosity—driving her to study how nervous systems heal, how neurons return to life, and how something broken might become whole again.
On October 31, 2025, she successfully defended her doctoral dissertation at the University of Georgia—a milestone years in the making. In December, she’ll walk across the stage as Dr. Medlock-Lanier, and soon after, she’ll begin a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis, named in honor of Nobel laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini.
Taylor’s path to this moment wasn’t linear. She changed her major five times at Barton before landing in biology.
“I had no idea what I wanted to do,” she admits with a laugh. “Sometimes I still don’t, you know? I’m a lifelong learner.”
Barton wasn’t just where she discovered what she wanted to do—it’s where she learned she could do it. The Whitehurst Family Honors Program’s requirement for independent research proved transformative. Working one-on-one with biology faculty on a project partnered with North Carolina State University, Taylor earned keys to the science lab and the freedom to work after hours. It was the first time she felt the rhythm of real scientific work, with the long nights, the setbacks, and the small breakthroughs that keep you coming back.
“Research doesn’t wait. Research doesn’t sleep. Sometimes you have to go in at a weird time,” she says. “I started really getting confidence as a scientist and feeling comfortable at the bench.”
That confidence wasn’t handed to her—she earned it, and some days it was painful. Taylor remembers failing “Organic Chemistry II” the first time and sitting in Dr. Kevin N. Pennington’s office, vice president for academic affairs and associate professor of biology, in tears. She retook it, though, and got a B. She also laughs now about getting 10 points taken off a practical simply for scratching her forehead during sterile technique. “I made eye contact with Dr. Pennington and said, ‘I know I’m gonna get points off for that.’ And I did,” she says. “But I won’t forget it.”
Taylor’s involvement at Barton was nothing short of remarkable. She served in student government, performed in theatre, participated in Greek life, worked as an orientation leader, and cheered on the sidelines, all with the same fearless curiosity that defined her approach to learning.
That curiosity caught the attention of graduate programs. During an interview, one University of Georgia professor looked at her CV and said, “You were really involved on campus. We need someone like that here, someone who can contribute to student government and be active in the department’s organizations.”
“They recruited me because of my Barton experience,” Taylor reflects. “Those were the experiences I had, the people who wrote letters of recommendation for me, and the opportunities that helped build my CV.”
Her doctoral work was elegant in its ambition. She and a colleague screened seventy-four candidate genes important for dopamine neurons—the ones that die in Parkinson’s Disease—and found ten hits, a stunning success rate. The breakthrough came when they discovered two genes that acted as location-specific regulators, controlling dopamine neuron regeneration only in certain parts of the nervous system. The paper is now under review, the product of five years and countless late nights and the kind of thoughtful experimentation that only happens when you’ve learned to be patient with failure.
But if you ask Taylor what she learned from her PhD, she won’t talk about genes first. She’ll talk about communication.
“Science is nothing without communication,” she says, and her voice rises with conviction. “I can do the experiments, and I can find the answers, but if I don’t communicate that, that’s not helpful for anybody. It is worthless.”
That conviction led her to become “Taylor the Worm Scientist” on TikTok, adapting trending content to showcase her research. She partners with Skype a Scientist to video chat with K-12 classrooms across the country. She brings planarians to STEM days at local schools, letting five-year-olds mimic the research she does in her lab and watching their faces light up when she tells them the head will grow back.
The outreach isn’t ancillary to her work—it is her work.
“I had no idea what scientists could do,” Taylor admits. “It’s really more than just being a scientist myself. It’s encouraging and supporting the next generation of scientists to pursue their dreams and their passions.”
This commitment to the next generation will continue as Taylor embarks on her next chapter in her postdoctoral position. Taylor will be co-mentored in two labs—one studying spinal cord regeneration, another studying muscle regeneration—both using zebrafish as models.
“I will use zebrafish as a model instead of worms,” Taylor explains. The switch is necessary because planarians, while excellent regenerators, lack some of the critical features—like clearly identified motor neurons and neuromuscular junctions—needed to study ALS effectively.
“The ALS field is actually quite small,” she notes. “Everybody kind of knows everybody. One lab collaborates with every other lab, because who doesn’t want a cure for ALS? You kind of all just have to work together.”
It’s that collaborative spirit again—the same one she learned at Barton, the same one that helped her find purpose, the same one that drives her outreach work. After her postdoctoral work, Taylor dreams of opening her own lab, ideally back in North Carolina at an institution with a medical school. There, she’ll continue her research while training the next generation of scientists, building the kind of supportive community she found at Barton.
In celebration of completing her doctoral work, Taylor and her husband, Casey Lanier, who married in 2021, will finally take their honeymoon—Europe, a week in Italy for a conference she’ll chair, then backpacking through countries she’s never seen.
For students following in her footsteps, Taylor’s advice is characteristically thoughtful. “Be curious,” she urges. “If something doesn’t make sense, even if you think it’s a stupid question—there are no stupid questions. I stopped saying that. I just say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m naive about this subject. I am ignorant on this subject.’ And don’t let that stop you.”
She adds, “Just believe in yourself, because I think we are capable of doing more than we could ever imagine. In writing my acknowledgments for my dissertation, I thank my parents because they have always believed in me. They believed I could do this before I did.”
She thanked herself in her dissertation, too “Acknowledge that what you’re doing is hard. If it wasn’t hard, everybody would do it. If you acknowledge that what you’re doing is hard, and that you are strong, and that you are capable, especially when you’re surrounded by a village and by a good community who will build you up and support you and catch you when you fall—you can do anything. You’re unstoppable.”
Throughout her journey, Taylor returns again and again to what makes Barton special: the community, the investment in students that extends far beyond graduation, the willingness to meet students where they are.
She remembers learning to pipette in her microbiology class, getting real hands-on experience rather than just watching a teacher’s assistant do the work.
“At Barton, you’re never too slow,” she emphasizes. “You are right on track, and you are right on time, and they are going to meet you where you are. That is what happened to me. I was met where I was.”
“Barton really just makes everyone feel at home,” Taylor reflects. “Having that community and that connection… I can’t even put into words what it means to me. Barton will celebrate you while you’re there, they’ll celebrate you after you’ve left. They will celebrate you forever, and they’ll support you.”
With much to celebrate and look forward to, Dr. Taylor Medlock-Lanier stands as proof of what’s possible when talent meets opportunity, when curiosity meets community, and when Barton invests everything in helping students discover—and become—their best selves.