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 PhD degree from Dokuz Eylul University Department of Public Finance. Her PhD 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. Afterwards, 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.She has published books, articles and papers on foreign direct investments, economic growth, panel econometrics, experimental economics and game theory. She is currently working at the Department of Public Finance and Financial Management at Izmir Katip Çelebi University/Turkey. In addition, Açikgöz teaches at the Department of International Trade and Finance at Izmir University of Economics/Turkey and the Department of Economics at University of Life Sciences in Poznan (Uniwersytet Przyrodniczy w Poznaniu)/Poland.