Dr. Talavage received a B.S. in Computer and Electrical Engineering and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University in 1992 and 1993, and, in 1998, a Ph.D. from the Speech and Hearing Sciences Program of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. His doctoral work included mapping the tonotopic organization of human auditory cortex using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and the development of techniques that facilitate application of fMRI to the study of auditory neurophysiology.

In 1998, Dr. Talavage joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, and became a joint faculty member in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering in 1999. Since 2004, Dr. Talavage has also held an adjunct appointment with the Division of Imaging Sciences, in the Department of Radiology at the Indiana University School of Medicine, where he serves as the fMRI research liaison. Dr. Talavage's research group seeks to improve the quality of life for users of auditory neuroprostheses through improvement of hardware and speech signal representations, based on the outcomes of fMRI experiments as well as computational and behavioral models, representing both normal and impaired hearing conditions.