Edwards Family Empowerment

3. My third major career decision was to remain devoutly focused in the face of adversity. Failure was never an option. I leaned heavily on 2Corinthians 12:9, as I still do. I worked there for a year, it was third shift working at night, but I was always stopping by campus every week to read all the job postings. I desperately wanted to be in pharmaceutical research and on the biologics side. And finally one day, I saw what I was looking for and finally got into The Upjohn Company as a Research Associate. My first salaried position with benefits and paid vacation. It was here that I learned many surgical techniques, on many different species. I was even doing angioplasty on pigs & delivering nanoparticles to reverse plaque narrowing in arteries (atherosclerosis). I also got to write many technical papers and get published in professional journals like the Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology. 4. My fourth major career decision was to take a job doing what I didn’t ...

I am the son, and only child of Willie Dean (Edwards) Turman, and Eugene Coker; both of Selma, AL. I’ve only met my biological father a handful of times, but my mother married Henry Turman in 1976, he adopted me, and he raised me and loved me throughout the rest of his life. We lived in Detroit for a few years after that, but left east Detroit as the city began to rapidly deteriorate. The Detroit of my youth was a grand and beautiful place; I miss it. It was at the end of summer in 1978 that we made our way to the small, quiet farming community of Litchfield, Michigan, and that is when this city boy began to learn how to do many things working our small produce and pig farm. In preparing to write this bio about the various careers I’ve had, I instinctively fast forwarded to all the things I’ve done since graduating from Western Michigan University, but life has a way of sometimes leading you back across paths you’ve already walked, and I must admit, many of the skills I learned on...