About Vern Turner
Vernon Turner is the author of five non-fiction books on politics and public education. He is also working on BRASSIE, a novel of personal growth and golf. He wrote a weekly op-ed column for five years at the award-winning River Cities Daily Tribune in Marble Falls, TX and his columns still appear regularly in The Oklahoma Observer.
In previous careers, he wrote many biological and manufacturing engineering articles for scientific and trade journals. Vernon draws on a wealth of experience as a world traveler, a scientist, an educator and an engineer in various industries.
As a Manufacturing Engineer, he headed several, multi-million dollar capital projects in automation, robotics and sophisticated electro-chemical processes. These non-academic endeavors required as much research and implementation as any education-related tasks.
He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Zoology and Chemistry from Ohio University and a Master of Science degree in Biology from San Diego State University. His teaching career spans the breadth of teaching anatomy as a graduate assistant at SDSU and as an anatomy laboratory instructor at Wright State University Medical School.
Vernon’s “second” career revolved around teaching Language Arts and all sciences in grades 6-12 in public schools in Colorado and Texas. These assignments included teaching AP Physics and AP Biology. He also served six years as a combat medic in the Ohio and California National Guard.
Vernon’s travels include the United Kingdom, Mexico, Canada, Greenland, Uganda, Tanzania (where he climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro), China, New Zealand and the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador.