Dr Turkmani is a Research Fellow at the Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit in the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She directs the Syria conflict research programme at the Unit. Her policy-oriented research work focuses on identity politics, legitimate governance, transforming war economy it into peace economy and the relationship between local and external drivers of the conflict. She is a member of the Women's Advisory Board to the UN special envoy to Syria and sits on the advisory board of airwars.org which monitor the International coalition strikes against ISIS. She directed the project: ‘Crowd-sourcing Conflict and Peace ‘Events' in the Syrian conflict' which produced a detailed database of instances of violence and peace-making.
Dr Turkmani takes the results of her research to policy making table, she was invited twice by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in the UK parliament to give expert evidence on aspects of the Syria crisis and the UK foreign policy. In 2016, Turkmani wrote a chapter on the EU policy on Syria as part of the report ‘From hybrid peace to human security; Rethinking EU Strategy towards Conflict’ which was officially presented to the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs & Security Policy, Federica Mogherini as part of Mogherini global review of EU external strategy. Part of the language of the report was adopted in the final new EU external strategy that Mogherini published in 2016.
She appears regularly in Arabic and English media commenting on Syria.
She is an Astrophysicist by training, previous Dorothy Hodgkin fellow of the Royal Society and writer/curator on the history Islamic science and culture focusing on the impact of the Arabic/Islamic science on the scientific revolution in the 17th century. She curated two international exhibitions on the subject.