William Lofton Turner

Betts Chair of Education and Human Development, Professor of Human and Organizational Development

Ph.D., Virginia Polytechnic Institute

Joined faculty in 2009

William Lofton Turner, Ph.D., is Betts Chair of Education and Human Development and Professor of Human and Organizational Development. He teaches and advises students in the Ph.D. program in Community Research and Action and in the master’s program in Human Development Counseling. He also directs the Health and Human Services track of the Human and Organizational Development undergraduate program. In 2011, he was appointed a Family Health Policy Associate of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy at Meharry Medical College. During 2007-2008, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow to then Senator, now President Barack Obama. From 2001-2009, he was Professor of Marriage and Family Therapy and Human Development in the Department of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota. Prior to that, he was Professor of Family Therapy and Family Studies at the University of Kentucky. He received a B.A. in Journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an M.M.F.T. in Family Therapy from Abilene Christian University, and a Ph.D. in Family and Child Development with specialization in Marriage and Family Therapy from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He completed a clinical internship in family therapy at the Lewis-Gale Hospital Substance Abuse Treatment Program in Salem, Virginia. In addition to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, he has received fellowships from the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the Michigan State University Institute for Children, Youth, and Families.

Dr. Turner's scholarly interests are situated between three distinct yet interrelated areas of scholarship: 1) the development, implementation and evaluation of evidence-based, family focused prevention and intervention programs in community settings using community-based participatory methods; 2) the development of culturally sensitive and appropriate family therapy intervention strategies in clinical and community settings; and 3) the translation of clinical and basic research to health policy related to finding solutions to mental and physical health disparities in America's poor and minority families in both rural and urban settings.

His program of research is conceptually grounded in systems theory, life course, developmental and other ecological perspectives, and his research and writings have centered on themes related to family strengths and their relationship to health and mental health prevention and intervention, specifically in the areas of substance abuse, clinical family therapy, adolescent development, rehabilitation, family-based end-of-life care, and health policy. The methodological approaches he uses to explore these issues are comparative, longitudinal, and multi-method. The comparative dimension of his research comprises in-depth within group analysis of African American, American Indian, Hmong, White, and, Hispanic/Latino families, as well as systematic examinations of similarities and differences across groups. He employs longitudinal designs in his studies to identify distinct and often nuanced contextual and ethnic/racial features of development that shape the family structures, processes and life course transitions families experience over time.

He has served on scientific study sections at the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the National Institute of Mental Health. He received the award for economic and cultural diversity from the American Family Therapy Academy and the Sussman Award from the National Council on Family Relations. He has served as associate editor of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy as well as guest editor for two special issues addressing the translation of basic research on ethnically diverse families to clinical practice. He is on the Board of Directors of the Family Process Institute and on the editorial boards of several journals in the social sciences.

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