After high school education in Haydarpaşa Anatolian Technical High School - Electronics Department, A.Cagatay Talay received his B.Sc. degree in Computer Science&Engineering from Yildiz Technical University, İstanbul, Turkey, in 2001. A.Cagatay Talay received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Engineering from the Dept. of Computer Engineering, Istanbul Technical University, in 2003 and 2011, respectively. He also serves as a Research Assistant at the same department. His PhD thesis was "Novel interference and spectrum aware routing techniques for cognitive radio ad hoc networks" and supervised by Dr. D. Turgay Altilar.
From May 2008 to January 2009, he was a visiting researcher at the Wireless Communication and Signal Processing (WCSP) group under the guidance of Dr. Huseyin Arslan, University of South Florida, USA. From July 2011 to Septemter 2011, Cagatay was a visiting faculty at University of Pennsylvania, The School of Engineering and Applied Science, Dept. of Electrical and Systems Eng., The Multimedia and Networking Laboratory (MnLab) and was working alongside Prof. Saswati Sarkar.