C. Heath Turner

Prof. Turner completed his BS in chemical engineering at Auburn University and his PhD in chemical engineering at NC State University. He spent several years in industry with Monsanto, Birmingham Steel, and Trinity Consultants.  He initially joined The University of Alabama as an assistant professor (2003). He served as the head of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering for seven years, during which time the department moved up 45 positions in the U.S. News and World Report Rankings. He is the inaugural director of the UA Polymers and Soft Materials Research Center.  Over the past several years, he has been a visiting Faculty Fellow at NASA-Langley, the Naval Research Lab, and the Air Force Research Lab, and Visiting Professor at Vanderbilt University. He has published over 140 journal articles in the areas of computational catalysis, interfacial phenomena, ionic liquids, and polymers, with the goal of making stronger connections to experimental observables.