Professor Turkington's research lies at the interface between nonlinear partial differential equations and statistical mechanics. His recent work has focused on applying the techniques of statisical mechanics to modeling coherent structures in two-dimensional turbulence, geophysical fluid flows and other complex systems, such as nonintegrable, nonlinear Schr"odinger equations. For instance, he and his collaborators have shown how the observed zonal jets and vortical spots in the atmosphere of Jupiter arise as equilibrium macrostates in a statistical model, and how the statistical properties of the small-scale potential vorticity flucuations determine the features of the stable, large-scale mean flow. In his current work Turkington is developing general stategies of model reduction for complex systems, such as Hamiltonian systems with many degrees of freedom, by adapting ideas from nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, information theory and optimization.