Research Professor - Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health
Dr. Turner is a cognitive neuroscientist and principal investigator with decades of experience in both academic and industry research. She joined The Ohio State University Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health as a professor in June 2022 following nine years as a professor in psychology, neuroscience and gerontology at Georgia State University. She leverages her academic background in mathematics, psychology and neuroscience to lead research projects related to neuroimaging and genetics, analysis of brain circuits, advanced modeling and the application of big data techniques in clinical neuroscience.
Dr. Turner’s research program uses neuroimaging of psychiatric populations to improve understanding of the structural and functional circuitry underlying mental illness and health. This involves multiple approaches, including:
- The combination of imaging with genetics to identify genotypes that might help individualize treatment and prognosis.
- Structural and functional imaging across multiple institutions to develop robust clinical neuroimaging studies.
- The use of neuroimaging methods in schizophrenia and other disorders to determine the relationship between brain volume and functional characteristics with disease status and symptom profiles.
- Large-scale neuroimaging data sharing to support the international collaborations needed to perform imaging genetics analyses.
Dr. Turner has been a leader in multisite neuroimaging and regularly contributes to worldwide collaborative studies, including those for the ENIGMA (Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics Through Meta Analysis) consortium. Her research portfolio has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation and both internal and mentored grants. She’s shared her insight in more than 250 peer-reviewed journal articles and 150 posters, multiple book chapters, professional presentations, symposia and workshops.
Her professional investment in the research and education community is reflected in her time spent on NIH and international grant review panels and committee participation for professional societies, including the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, Society of Biological Psychiatry and Schizophrenia International Research Society. She has also chaired or worked on national task forces related to schizophrenia, hallucinations, neuroimaging, data sharing and other research.
Dr. Turner received her PhD in cognitive sciences from the University of California, Irvine (UCI). She completed her postdoctoral work in neuroscience at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, before joining the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Long Beach, California, where she used neuroimaging to research cortical reorganization following spinal cord injury. New positions followed in 2003 at the UCI Psychiatry department, to work on multisite neuroimaging in schizophrenia, and The Mind Research Network in 2010. Dr. Turner was then named chair of the neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience research program at Georgia State University, where she also managed the cognitive neuroscience graduate concentration in psychology.
Dr. Turner is currently a field chief editor for Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, and she’s served as guest editor for Human Brain Mapping and NeuroImage and editorial board member for BioMedInformatics, Neuroinformatics and Frontiers in Neuroscience: Brain Imaging Methods.