Bilge studied Psychology and Computer Science at Kiel University and at the University of California, San Diego. After completing his master’s thesis on color vision, he joined the Ph.D. program in Neuroscience at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), where he investigated spatial vision in Michael Herzog’s laboratory, and graduated with a dissertation on grouping and Gestalt in visual contextual modulation. Following his Ph.D., Bilge conducted postdoctoral research with Patrick Cavanagh in Paris, and Johan Wagemans at KU Leuven. He subsequently held a joint appointment as SNSF Professor at the University of Bern and CNRS researcher at the Université de Lille. Currently, he is a CNRS researcher at the École Normale Supérieure, leading the Psychophysics of Appearance Lab and the Consciousness and Cognition team at the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (LSCP).