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Dr. James C. Turner serves as executive director of the department of student health and the National Social Norms Institute at the University of Virginia and is a professor of internal medicine at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.He received his medical degree from the University of Wisconsin Medical School in Madison and completed an internal medicine residency at the University of Virginia. After seven years of practice that included the Indian Health Service in Arizona and general internal medicine in Wisconsin, Dr. Turner entered college health in 1985. 

He first became a director of student health at the University of South Carolina in Columbia in 1988 and has served in his current capacity as executive director of the University of Virginia's Department of Student Health since 1993. In this capacity, Dr. Turner has overseen the expansion of the health service to include counseling and disability services, the implementation of alcohol education programs using social norms marketing, the initiation of JCAHO ambulatory care accreditation, and the implementation of electronic health records. He has been on the admissions committee at the School of Medicine since 2003 and a member of University workgroups on severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), HIV/AIDS, alcohol abuse, and smallpox vaccination. He has also provided several scholarly presentations at regional and national meetings on these and other topics and has several appearances nationally and regionally on radio and television discussing health issues that affect college students. Dr. Turner served on Governor Mark Warner's Task Force on Cervical Cancer in the Commonwealth of Virginia in 2005. 

Dr. Turner is president-elect of the American College Health Association (ACHA), and served as the chair of the association's Vaccine Preventable Disease Committee from 1999 to 2008.  He is currently Liaison Representative of ACHA on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). ACIP writes all national guidelines for immunizations in the United States. Finally, he recently completed a two-year term as a member of the board of trustees for the Bacchus Network in Denver.

Dr. Turner has published or edited over fifty articles, book chapters, or guidelines. Citations are included in such peer-reviewed journals as Clinical Infectious Diseases, Journal of the American Medical Association, Journal of Clinical Microbiology, Journal of American College Health, and  Journal of Studies on Alcohol. National guidelines or position papers have included: Guidelines for Preparing the University for SARS and Recommended Institutional Pre-Matriculation Immunizations, both published by ACHA. In addition to serving as an invited reviewer for the Medical Letter and the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Dr. Turner has published a number of articles in the lay press and higher education periodicals.

Dr. Turner's research interests include epidemiology of streptococcal infections, impact of health education on sexual behaviors, alcohol-related emergency room visits, value of blood alcohol concentration in predicting negative outcomes, and the impact of campus alcohol education programs on negative consequences.