Prof. Gat took his doctorate from the University of Oxford. He has been an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Germany (three times: Freiburg, Munich, Constance), a Fulbright Fellow in the USA (Yale), a British Council Scholar in Britain (Oxford), a Visiting Fellow at the Mershon Center, The Ohio State University, the Goldman Visiting Israeli Professor at Georgetown, and the Koret distinguished Israeli Fellow at the Hoover Institute, Stanford.

He was twice Chair of the Department (no School) of Political Science at Tel Aviv University (1999-2003, 2009-2013), and is the founder and head of the Executive Master's Program in Diplomacy and Security and the International MA in Security and Diplomacy at Tel Aviv. He is the incumbent of the Ezer Weitzman Chair for National Security.