Ömer Taşpınar is Professor of Security Studies at the National War College (National Defense University), a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University, SAIS (School of Advanced International Studies) in Washington DC.

His areas of expertise include Turkey, Kurdish nationalism, Political Islam, American Foreign Policy, the Middle East, the European Union, and Muslims in Europe. He is the author of three books: Kurdish Nationalism and Political Islam: Kemalist Identity in Transition (Routledge, 2005); Wining Turkey: How the EU and the US can Restore a Fading Partnership (with Philip Gordon, Brookings, 2008); What the West is Getting Wrong about the Middle East: Why Islam is not the Problem (I.B. Tauris, 2020).