Deanne Taylor is on a mission to map the uncharted territory of childhood health. In 2017, she attended a groundbreaking presentation on the Human Cell Atlas—a project aiming to chart every cell in the human body. But there was a catch: it focused only on adults.

Taylor saw this as a stark oversight and began advocating for the inclusion of children. She joined the Human Cell Atlas’s volunteer team, helping write a section dedicated to pediatric research. This campaign led to the establishment of the Developmental Genotype-Tissue Expression Project (dGTEx), which aims to create a comprehensive database of healthy pediatric tissue.

The dGTEx project collects samples from otherwise healthy children and maps how genes across major organ systems are expressed, providing crucial data for research into normal development, diseases, drug effectiveness and more. Taylor's work is part of a larger effort that now includes a dedicated pediatric section in the Human Cell Atlas.

Through her career, Taylor has always been driven by a singular question: why do people get sick differently? Her current focus on understanding gene expression could provide key insights into this mystery. By studying how genes are expressed differently at different stages of life, researchers may uncover new ways to diagnose and treat illnesses.

By mapping the cellular landscape of childhood, Taylor hopes to open up a window of intervention in human disease—a view that could change medical research for good.