Middle East Technical University (METU, or Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi) is a public research university in the Çankaya district of Ankara, Turkey. It was founded on 15 November 1956 as the Middle East Institute of Technology, after a United Nations study recommended that Turkey establish a technical institute to train architects and regional planners; legislation in 1957 gave the university its present name. English has been the language of instruction from the outset, a characteristic that set METU apart from most Turkish state institutions of its era. Enrolment stands at roughly 23,400 students across undergraduate and graduate levels.

The university is organised into five faculties — Architecture, Arts and Sciences, Economic and Administrative Sciences, Education, and Engineering — which together comprise some 42 academic departments and deliver the undergraduate curriculum. Graduate study is administered through five separate graduate schools covering natural and applied sciences, social sciences, informatics, applied mathematics, and marine sciences. Admission to undergraduate programmes runs through Turkey's centralised national entrance examination, and METU departments draw their intake from the highest-scoring band of that applicant pool.

METU has been among the leading recipients of national research funding from TÜBİTAK, Turkey's scientific and technological research council, and the country's first internet connection was established through the university's computer centre in 1993. METU Teknokent, opened as Turkey's first science and technology park, hosts firms working mainly in information and communication technologies, electronics, aerospace and advanced materials. The Ankara campus, in use since 1963 and the first purpose-built university campus in Turkey, covers about 4,500 hectares, of which roughly 3,000 form the METU Forest — woodland planted from the 1960s onward by students and volunteers on terrain that had been largely bare steppe. The university also operates an Institute of Marine Sciences at Erdemli on the Mediterranean coast and a campus in Northern Cyprus.