Bernur Açikgöz attended Ankara Finance High School and continued her undergraduate studies at Dokuz Eylül University, Department of Finance. She received her master’s degree in Financial Law from Dokuz Eylül University. In 2006, she was awarded her Ph.D. degree from Dokuz Eylul University Department of Public Finance. Her Ph.D. thesis covered the topics of poverty and development.
In 2006, she won the Harvard University Project scholarship and worked as a visiting professor at Harvard University. In 2009, she received a scholarship from the Swiss Government for a post-doctorate degree in economics at the University of Neuchatel/Switzerland and taught courses at Bern Universities. She then began to work in the fields of experimental economics and game theory and for three consecutive years as a guest lecturer in the economics laboratory of the Montpellier University in Montpellier, France. Afterward, she went to Missouri University, Indiana University and Arizona University with a scholarship from Missouri University. She then worked as a visiting professor at the
University of East Anglia and took some courses from Exeter Universities in the UK with a Tubitak scholarship.