Professor Eric Taylor is a leading UK child psychiatrist and retiring head of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry department at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College, London, where he has been notably successful in unpicking the clinical nature and longitudinal course of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorders.

His efforts to track the development of impulsiveness and inattention in children have resulted in identification a subtype of ADHD that has led in turn to improved diagnostic criteria, understanding failures of response control by the brain as a key part of the cause, and clarification of the distinction between hyperactivity and conduct disorder.

His longitudinal epidemiological studies have set targets for treatment, and his treatment trials and reviews provided the basis for European guidelines on the diagnosis and management of ADHD.
In 2008 in acknowledgment of his groundbreaking research, he was awarded the Ruane Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Research.