Zeynep is professor of International Relations and Political Science and Director of the Foreign Policy Programme at the Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies (EDAM).
Her academic research focuses on a wide range of topics. She has worked on gender (and) international security, democratisation, human rights and citizenship issues in Turkey, as well as Turkey-EU relations and Turkish foreign policy. Zeynep has taught international politics in various capacities and was a visiting professor at Portland State University. She worked for 19 years at a foundation university in Istanbul as a department head and dean of the Faculty of Business and Administrative Sciences.
Zeynep founded the Women in Foreign Policy Initiative and is a board member of the European Leadership Network (ELN). In 2014, she was selected as one of the 4 leaders under 40 in the Euro-Atlantic security area and spent her sabbatical at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington D.C.
She received her BA in Economics from Galatasaray University in 2000, her MA in 2001 and her PhD from the University of Kentucky in 2005.

At THE NEW INSTITUTE, Zeynep is involved as Yehudit and Yehuda Elkana Fellow in the Academic Year 2024/25