Sezai Ercisli completed a Master's degree and Ph.D. thesis on wild edible fruits at Ataturk University. He studied at Nebraska University, USA, between 1998 and 2000, and worked on plant biotechnology. He has published around 512 papers in SCI-indexed journals. His index was 48 and he was among the most important 100,000 scientists in the world according to the Stanford University ranking of research published in Plos Biology journal in 2020.