 Özsoyoglu earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Middle East Technical University in Ankara before moving to the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada for her doctoral studies.Her 1980 dissertation, "Distributed Database Query Optimization Using Semi-Joins", was supervised by Clement T. Yu.She joined the faculty at Case Western Reserve University in 1980,
becoming the first female faculty member in her department and the second in the engineering school.