My main areas of research interest to date have been twofold. First, I am interested in multivariate statistical methods that deal with robust estimation and outlier detection. Observations in real data sets generally do not satisfy the same model (i.e., data are not homogeneous or outlier-free). My work in this area is the construction of statistical procedures which are still reliable and reasonably efficient in a neighborhood of the assumed model. The second major area of my research is in statistical genetics, specifically, examining potential sources of missing heritability and proposing research strategies to shed light on the underlying genetic architecture of complex diseases for more effective disease prevention or treatment. I have been working on the identification rare variant associations which is one of the many possible explanations for the missing heritability. In more general framework, I am interested in tackling other sources of the hidden heritability mystery such as structural variations, epigenetics, gene-environment interactions, multi-trait and integrative data analysis that can help enlighten underlying causal variants and improve our understanding of the genetic etiology of many complex diseases.

Asuman Turkmen joined the statistics faculty in 2008. She is a faculty affiliate of the Translational Data Analytics (TDA) at the Ohio State University and is a faculty at the Newark Campus. She is the recipient of the Ohio State University Newark Scholarly Achievement Award in 2015.