University of Warwick
Prof Turner studied Physics as an undergraduate at Southampton University before earning a PhD in theoretical physics from Cambridge University, where he studied the dynamics of polymers that can exchange mass. He then undertook research at the French CNRS in Strasbourg. In 1991 he was elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and in 1995 to a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. During this period he spent a year in the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California Santa Barbara before being appointed to the faculty at Warwick in 1996. He was later the Keck visiting fellow in the Centre for Studies in Physics and Biology at Rockefeller University in New York, arguably the world’s premier research institute for molecular biology. He has since worked on problems at the interface between Physics and Biology. In 2010 he became an EPSRC Leadership Fellow and has been working on some completely new problems, including in swarming animals, so-called “active matter” and even at the interface with economics.