Samantha Turner, PhD, RN is a registered nurse and postdoctoral fellow in the Eating Disorder Assessment and Treatment Program at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Her research centers around equitable access to eating disorder prevention, screening, diagnosis, and treatment, particularly for adolescents in marginalized bodies. She aims to restructure the eating disorder assessment and treatment landscape to include all of those who can benefit and sees nursing as a discipline well-suited to this challenge.
Clinically, Dr. Turner has worked as a pediatric nurse in primary care, school settings, and outpatient eating disorder programs. She has collaborated with the Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders (STRIPED) at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she researched predictors of and novel strategies to reduce disordered weight control behaviors. Merging her clinical and research backgrounds, she has a keen interest in the development of interventions and policy that are designed with the target population at their center.
Dr. Turner received her Bachelor’s degree in Nutrition and Dietetics from Simmons University. She received her Nursing degree and PhD in Nursing from UMass Chan Medical School. During her training, her research focused on weight stigma in pediatric health care and eating disorder treatment, as well as policy approaches to reduce the prevalence of disordered weight control behaviors among children and adolescents.