Istanbul Technical University (İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi, commonly abbreviated İTÜ) traces its origins to 1773, when Sultan Mustafa III founded the Imperial School of Naval Engineering on the Golden Horn to train shipwrights and cartographers for the Ottoman navy. A companion school of military engineering followed in 1795, and a course of study in architecture was added in 1845. The institution was reorganised as a civil engineering school in 1909 and had gained recognition as a university of engineering and architecture by 1928. It adopted its present name in 1944 and became an autonomous university two years later, giving it one of the longest continuous engineering traditions of any institution in the world.

The university is organised into more than a dozen faculties spanning civil engineering, architecture, mechanical engineering, electrical and electronics engineering, computer and informatics engineering, mining, chemical and metallurgical engineering, naval architecture and ocean engineering, aeronautics and astronautics, management, maritime studies, textile technologies and design, and the sciences and letters. Undergraduate and graduate enrolment together comes to roughly 37,000 students, taught by some 2,300 academic staff. Teaching is delivered in Turkish and in English, and a number of degrees are run jointly with partner institutions abroad.

Research is concentrated in institutes devoted to energy, informatics and Eurasian earth sciences, supported by centres for satellite communications and remote sensing, rotorcraft, materials science and polar studies. The main Ayazağa campus, a suburban site in Maslak in the Sarıyer district of Istanbul, holds the rectorate, the Mustafa İnan central library, a TRIGA Mark-II research reactor and the national high-performance computing centre, as well as the Arı Technopolis science park opened in 2003. Three smaller urban campuses sit near Taksim Square: Taşkışla, a historic Ottoman-era building once used as military barracks that houses architecture, along with Gümüşsuyu and Maçka. A further campus at Tuzla serves the maritime faculty, and one campus operates in Famagusta.