Turner has a B.A. from Northwestern University (1970), and earned her M.A. (1973) and Ph.D. (1977) from New York University. She conducted her postdoctoral work at the University of Michigan Medical School, and then moved to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1987 and was promoted to professor in 1998. As of 2024 she is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
In 2019 she was named editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Research
Turner is known for her work on Primates, with a focus on the vervet monkey. Her early work examined blood proteins and growth stages in vervet monkeys. She was a part of the team that sequenced the genome for the vervet monkey. She has also examined ethics in population biology research and examined the experiences of women in the field of biological anthropology.
Turner, Trudy R.; Schmitt, Christopher A.; Cramer, Jennifer Danzy (2019). Savanna monkeys: the genus Chlorocebus. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-0-521-78294-4.