Roy Taylor is widely acknowledged for his influential basic research on and development of diverse lasers systems and their application. He has contributed extensively to advances in picosecond and femtosecond dye laser technology, compact diode-laser and fibre-laser-pumped vibronic lasers and their wide-ranging application to fundamental studies, such as time resolved photophysics of resonant energy transfer and relaxation pathways of biological probes and organic light gates.

Roy is particularly noted for his fundamental studies of ultrafast nonlinear optics in fibres, with emphasis on solitons, their amplification, the role of noise and self-effects, such as Raman gain. Through his integration of seeded, high-power fibre amplifiers and passive fibre he has demonstrated far-reaching versatility in pulse duration, repetition rate and spectral coverage. He contributed extensively to the development of high power supercontinuum or “white light” sources, which have been a remarkable scientific and commercial success. 

Roy’s many  and varied contributions have been recognized by the Ernst Abbé Award of the Carl Zeiss Foundation, the Thomas Young Medal of the Institute of Physics and the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society.