- AlumniProfile
When Cristin Taylor was in high school, she spent summers training with the Rochester (N.Y.) City Ballet, dreaming of becoming a professional dancer one day. That changed the summer before her senior year, when she injured her spine.
Despite working with an athletic trainer and a physical therapist, Taylor “wasn’t really able to ever fully recover in that time,” she says. “So, I had a bit of a late shift in my mindset about where I was going and what I wanted to do.” Taylor (’04) was fascinated by what her trainers and PTs were doing to help her recover. “I thought I could really enjoy working with athletes and helping people achieve their rehabilitation goals,” she says, “just like these people had done with me.”
It was the first of many strategic pivots throughout Taylor’s successful career, each uncovering new opportunities. Now, as a medical director for a $5 billion medical device company and the new chair of Sargent’s Clinical Advisory Board, she brings her expertise as a physical therapist and biomedical executive to help prepare students for the future of healthcare and to amplify Sargent’s prestigious reputation.
More Turning Points
Taylor enrolled at Sargent to study athletic training. While there, she developed an interest in adaptive sports and rehabilitation. “It was a real turning point in my life,” she says. Sargent was also where she developed the innovative mindset that prepared her to take on an array of exciting opportunities that have intersected the fields of physical therapy, medicine, and biomedicine.
After Sargent, she went on to pursue a Doctor of Physical Therapy at the University of Miami to gain more experience in adaptive sports and amputee rehabilitation. She then took her training in amputee rehabilitation to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where she worked as a physical therapist. Her next career shift led her to study to be a physician’s assistant at the George Washington University. Upon graduation, she gained exposure to clinical research in her new position as a PA in orthopedic oncology at Baltimore’s Sinai Hospital. Taylor found she could bring much of what she learned at Sargent and from her PT training to that role.
“I wound up working with adults and children throughout their operative journey in treatment and was able to leverage quite a bit of my experience in wound care, prosthetics, and rehabilitation from my work as an athletic trainer and physical therapist to better serve our patients,” she says. “I think that education made me a more holistic practitioner in that field.”
From Consulting to the Clinical Advisory Board
In late 2015, Taylor was back in Boston working as a PA to the chief of sports medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. But she missed the clinical research she’d grown to love at Sinai.
It was time for another career change, this time to the Andover, Mass.–based medical device manufacturer Smith & Nephew. As a global clinical strategy lead for its sports medicine franchise, Taylor was involved in getting medical devices approved for patient use in the US, Europe, and Asian countries. After a brief stint consulting for an in-vitro diagnostics company, she moved into the artificial intelligence field, leading the clinical affairs organization at PathAI, a Boston-based company that is developing algorithms for use in digital pathology.
How can we together advise this next generation of students who are entering into a world to be further impacted by advances in technology and artificial intelligence?
Today, Taylor is the senior medical director in the advanced wound care division at the global medical technology company Convatec, which earned more than $2 billion in revenues in 2023. She and her team ensure the safety and efficacy of Convatec’s wound care products, including designing clinical studies. She also oversees Convatec’s global medical education that provides healthcare professionals with the knowledge and skills necessary to use specific devices to improve patient outcomes in their clinical practice.
And as of March 2024, Taylor brings her vast knowledge to Sargent’s Clinical Advisory Board as its chair. The 12-person board provides guidance on clinical instruction at Sargent and serves as a forum for discussion about policy and advocacy issues that are most impacting patients. “Sargent has really set the bar for excellence in education for rehabilitation sciences,” she says. “How can we together advise this next generation of students who are entering into a world to be further impacted by advances in technology and artificial intelligence?”
One consideration she has is boosting collaboration with other areas of Boston University, such as the Center for Computing & Data Sciences.
Taylor points to the diversity of Sargent’s community as one of its greatest strengths. “We have diversity of thought, diversity of specialty,” she says. “The Clinical Advisory Board is a reflection of the diversity of the Sargent community, and everyone’s united in this vision to improve healthcare. It’s an honor to be a part of that group and think about how to best clinically prepare students for the future of health and rehabilitation sciences.”