About

Media Executive

Dr. Jennifer E. Turner

Founder, Mad Cool Fitness/mad Cool Community

Adjunct Professor, Rutgers School of Public Health

Dr. Jennifer Turner’s passion for health and fitness has been cultivated through a multi-decade long journey that started as a personal endeavor and grew into both a personal and professional mission. This mission has evolved from being just about fitness to a mission of increasing overall individual and community empowerment.


As a formerly overweight, asthmatic child with an eating disorder from the South Side of Chicago, Dr. Turner conquered her health issues to become the health educator, athlete, "fitness activator", and health empowerment expert she is today. Because she discovered empowerment and happiness through good health, Dr. Turner felt compelled to help others to discover and "activate" their own health empowerment.

WW LA 2022 - Jennifer Turner Speech

Being mentally and physically fit and empowered has enabled Dr. Turner to achieve in her career as a media executive.

Dr. Turner currently serves as EVP of TriStar Television for Sony Pictures Television where she manages the development and production of new premium television series to be aired on cable and streaming platforms. Over her career, Dr. Turner has worked on several hit television series across broadcast, cable, and streaming in both studio and network executive roles, including, “The Good Doctor”, “The Blacklist”, “The Boys”, “Grey’s Anatomy”, “Desperate Housewives”, “Lost”, critically-acclaimed “Friday Night Lights”, and social-justice themed shows “For Life” and “Woke”, among others.

She also established Bravo and Oxygen’s business development departments and was responsible for extending the networks’ brands into revenue-generating businesses for franchises such as “Top Chef” and “The Real Housewives”.

Prior to beginning her media career

Jennifer worked for Goldman Sachs in New York as a financial analyst in Fixed Income Capital Markets.

Dr. Turner has been recognized numerous times over her career. She was featured in Essence magazine’s “40 under 40” edition 2004; one of Ebony magazine’s “Women to Watch” in Entertainment 2006; Cablefax’s “Most Influential Minorities in Cable” 2009, 2011, and 2012, featured in Variety’s Inclusion Impact Report 2019, featured in Variety’s New York Women’s Impact Report 2021, and named to the Multichannel News Wonder Women LA Class of 2022 for exceptional female leaders in media.

In addition to her media career, combining her passion for fitness and desire to help others, Jennifer founded MAD COOL FITNESS, an inclusive, health empowerment, edutainment brand that helps people (with a focus on professional women) to feel better, look better, and be better, leveraging behavioral science.

Having maintained healthy living for over 20 years by focusing on her health behavior vs. dieting, Dr. Turner is designing effective, behavior science-based health empowerment programs targeted to individuals, families, and communities. She also founded sister non-profit MAD COOL COMMUNITY to partner more effectively with community anchor institutions to deliver health programs to underserved communities, with a particular focus on facilitating the health empowerment of adolescent girls in schools.

To support her mission of health, Dr. Turner went back to school and received her Doctor of Public Health specializing in Health Education and Behavioral Science, from Rutgers School of Public Health, where she currently teaches as an Adjunct Professor.


Given her interest in making communities healthier through health programming and policy, Dr. Turner’s dissertation evaluated the Healthy Schools Program (HSP) implementation at four, New Jersey, K-8 independent charter schools.

Using the Diffusion of Innovation as the analytical framework, Dr. Turner sought to uncover the level of HSP implementation at each study school, and factors impacting that implementation (e.g., the charter school’s context, social and environmental factors both in and outside of the school that affected HSP implementation).

Study results found the social determinants of health (e.g., economic stability, education, built environment) impacted HSP implementation in schools, as well as parent health behaviors, knowledge, and health status. Consistent themes across all study schools were: 1) The need to improve parent health and parent health behaviors, and 2) The concept that schools were dealing with many other social externalities (e.g., poverty, domestic violence, incarceration, immigration stress) that impacted a student’s ability to learn.

Teachers and administrators stated that schools were not just schools, they were “community centers” that were created to service the needs of the child, family, and the broader community.

Schools needed to be resourced accordingly, but were dramatically underresourced, or did not have the right kind of resources. Building on her dissertation findings and given the mental health crisis facing today’s youth, Dr. Turner is working with New Jersey charter schools to deliver a health empowerment program focused on youth, starting with adolescent girls.

Dr. Turner serves on various boards and councils supporting health and education. She sits on the Dean of Rutgers School of Public Health Advisory Council, Baruch College Weissman School of the Arts Advisory Council, The Rutgers University Alumni Association Board of Directors, and is a Northeast Region Trustee for Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

In addition to her doctorate, Dr. Turner holds a Master of Business Administration from Stanford University, a Bachelor of Finance from the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania, and a Bachelor of Japanese Language also from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Turner is also a New Jersey certified Teacher of Health Education N-12, an American Council on Exercise (ACE) certified Youth Fitness Specialist, Fitness Nutrition Specialist, Health Coach, Behavior Change Specialist, Group Fitness Instructor, and Personal Trainer. She is an avid athlete and runner having completed numerous marathons (including two Boston and three New York City Marathons) and triathlons, (including Ironman Lake Placid). She is also classically trained violinist.

WORK WITH ME

Mad Cool Community

 A non-profit addressing the Social Determinants of Health, increasing community capacity, and empowering communities to improve their overall well-being.

MAD COOL COMMUNITY is a wellness non-profit providing services (and facilitating services) addressing the social determinants of health to underserved communities at risk for health disparities.

A MAD COOL COMMMUNITY is an empowered community that leverages community stakeholders to unlock the power of their community for the betterment of its people.

MAD COOL COMMUNITY partners with anchor institutions to build community capacity, with a particular focus on increasing the empowerment capacity of schools, and addresses the mental and behavioral health of students, starting with adolescent girls via our MAD COOL Girls program.

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