Turner attended Harvard College, where he graduated cum laude in Chemistry and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army.
Deciding that he liked science more than war, he turned down the opportunity to continue as an active duty officer and went to the University of California at Berkeley to postdoc with Ignacio Tinoco, Jr.
Turner was also lucky to be part of the academic family of Tom Cech (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1989) during 2 sabbatical years at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
This has helped advance methods for predicting RNA structure from sequence, as well as RNA-RNA interactions: e.g. miRNA or siRNA target binding.
Recently, Turner and collaborators have used Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and Molecular Dynamics simulations of short RNAs to test understanding of the sequence dependence of stacking interactions.