Erkay Savaş received the BS (1990) and MS (1994) degrees in electrical engineering from the Electronics and Communications Engineering Department at Istanbul Technical University. He completed the Ph.D. degree in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Oregon State University in June 2000. He had worked for various companies and research institutions before he joined Sabanci University as an assistant professor in 2002. He is the director of the Cryptography and Information Security Group (CISec) of Sabanci University. His research interests include cryptography, data and communication security, privacy in biometrics, trusted computing, security and privacy in data mining applications, embedded systems security, and distributed systems. He is a member of IEEE, ACM, the IEEE Computer Society, and the International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR).

Erkay Savaş published scientific articles on the fields of cryptography, cryptographic engineering and applications of security and cryptography at prestigious international journals and proceedings of conferences and workshops including IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEE Proceedings Computers and Digital Techniques, Data and Knowledge Engineering, Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems.

He participated in many nationally-funded projects as well as one EU FP6 project as primary investigator and researcher. Some of the participated projects include sensor network security, privacy and security in embedded system design, privacy in biometrics, and privacy in data mining applications. Before his appointment at Sabanci University, he participated in projects funded by the NSF of USA and private industry in the USA.