Emily N. Taylor, Ph.D., is a Professor of Biological Sciences at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California, where she has been teaching and mentoring students in field-based environmental physiology research for fourteen years. She fell in love with snakes as an undergraduate at University of California - Berkeley, where she conducted research on the Baja California Rattlesnake (Crotalus enyo) and wrote the senior thesis for her English major on the representation of the serpent in the Bible. She next got her PhD in Biological Sciences at Arizona State University studying proximate mechanisms responsible for sexual size dimorphism in rattlesnakes. Emily keeps busy teaching classes ranging from herpetology to medical endocrinology, conducting research on lizards and snakes with her students, co-authoring an introductory biology textbook, serving as a faculty fellow for graduate education at Cal Poly, and most recently, opening 7Sisters Brewing Company in San Luis Obispo with her partner Steve. Emily is passionate about her German shepherd dogs, beekeeping, beer and wine, traveling, and anything to do with snakes, especially the pitvipers that initially hooked her into biology and have held on tight ever since.  



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