Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies

Doyia Turner

New position: Director, public relations, Saint Leo University, St. Leo; Previous position: Manager, global marketing communications, Eli Lilly and Co., Indianapolis.

Less than a month into her new role as director of public relations at Saint Leo University, Doyia Turner is involved with helping to reshape and rebrand the school's image.

"Working with our marketing department, I'm involved in a rebranding effort to better identify the area we serve," she said. The rebranding could include a new university logo, a new tag line and other image changes, she said.

Her involvement in the rebranding project is in addition to the prescribed responsibilities of her position: communicating with the news media, contributing to the college's Web site and publishing much of the university's literature, including its quarterly 36-page, multicolor alumni magazine.

Saint Leo serves three distinct groups of students among its more than 12,200 registered students, Turner said. These include the traditional on-campus students at its main campus north of Tampa, a rapidly growing number of students taking courses online and the university's third area of educational outreach - 13 centers in five states (Georgia, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia, in addition to Florida) where students can "go and get a Saint Leo education." Turner said the university is a "major provider of education to the military" - the sixth-largest such institution in the United States - and many of these sites are on military bases, including MacDill.

Before joining Saint Leo, Turner spent six years with Eli Lilly and Co. in Indianapolis as director of global communications. The job took her overseas to sites such as Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany. She previously held other public relations jobs in Indianapolis, working nearly 13 years in the industry.

Turner graduated from Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., in 1989 with a bachelor's degree in journalism and public relations. "I certainly knew I didn't want to go down the route of chemistry or mathematics," she said, laughing. "I'm the other side of the brain.

"I like building relationships with people," she said. "I base that a lot on trust and credibility. Working with journalists, that is crucial.

"I like it because there's a great deal of creativity in public relations," Turner added. "Not just dealing with the media. It's also showcasing or promising a product or service - doing video work, branding, all those creative things."

She said there are several key differences, and similarities, in representing a major pharmaceutical company and representing a university. "The audiences are different," she said. "Obviously, in higher education, you don't have to worry about stock prices. Most of what I did at Lilly was talk about new drugs approved by the FDA and that had an impact on stock prices. But it's very similar in terms of the same strategic objectives: How do we communicate about ourselves?"

Turner said she didn't mind the sometimes adversarial relationship between the media and the pharmaceutical industry. "There are two sides to every story," she said. "I didn't have a problem with that as long as I had the facts at hand. I'm always upfront with the media."

Turner, 36, was born in Heidelberg, Germany, and moved to Indianapolis at age 10. A daughter in a military family, "We moved around a lot," she said.

When she and her husband, Mark, moved to Florida in April, they didn't expect one of the rainiest seasons in the history of the state, she said. "We wanted to live in a warmer climate, but it's really warm here," she said. "But the weather now is fantastic."

Turner said she also was attracted to her position at Saint Leo because of her faith. "I am Catholic and it's a Catholic university. What brought me here were the university's core values," she said. "People here live those values."

Turner and her husband live in Tampa.