Kürşad Turgay studied Chemistry at the TU Berlin and received his Dr. rer. nat. from the Philipps University Marburg, where he worked with Mohamed Marahiel on non-ribosomal peptide synthetases. For his postdoctoral research he went to David Dubnau's lab at the Public Health Research Institute in New York City, where he worked on the control of competence development by regulated proteolysis in Bacillus subtilis. Next he joined Bernd Bukau's lab - first at the University of Freiburg and then at the ZMBH at the University of Heidelberg - to continue his studies on proteolysis. Kürşad Turgay was a Junior Professor at the Institute for Biology - Microbiology of the FU Berlin from 2004-2010. He habilitated in 2010 and is now a Heisenberg Fellow of the DFG at the FU Berlin.