Taylor Kessler Faulkner is an incoming Assistant Teaching Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington (UW). She teaches courses in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics. Taylor recently led the creation of the Graduate Certificate in Modern AI Methods, a new program for working professionals and recent graduates that launched in autumn 2025. Taylor also teaches for and manages this certificate. 

Taylor's research and teaching interests span a wide range of human-robot interaction and machine-learning topics. She received her B.S. in Computer Science from Denison University in 2016, with minors in Mathematics and Music Performance. Taylor completed her PhD as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow in Prof. Andrea Thomaz's Socially Intelligent Machines Lab at UT Austin, where she developed new algorithms that enabled robots to learn from imperfect human teachers using interactive reinforcement learning methods.  Her postdoctoral work as a UW Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow in Siddhartha Srinivasa's Personal Robotics Lab focused on assistive robotics, specifically the Assistive Dexterous Arm (ADA), an assistive feeding robot for people with upper-extremity mobility impairments.