Şentürk studied mathematics at Boğaziçi University, graduating in 1999. She came to the University of California, Davis for graduate study in statistics, earned a master's degree in 2001, and completed her PhD at Davis in 2004.[4] Her dissertation, Covariate Adjusted Regression and Correlation, was supervised by Hans-Georg Müller.[5]
She became an assistant professor of statistics at Pennsylvania State University in 2004, and moved to the UCLA Department of Biostatistics in 2011, adding a joint appointment with the UCLA Department of Statistics in 2014.[4]