Few of Turkey’s 63 private "Foundation" universities are more associated with an individual than Baskent University, which was founded in 1994 by Dr Mehmet Haberal.
Professional bodies associated with the foundation included the Turkish Organ Transplant and Burns Treatment Foundation which Haberal, who performed Turkey’s first kidney transplant, had founded in 1980.
Based in Turkey’s capital, Ankara, the university proclaims to be a vision "to be a home that provides high-level education based on scientific production in every field of advanced medical practice as an international brand, and which transforms this to a social added value on the road to its rightful place in the line of modern civilisation".
It has grown from its medical roots, so that the 16,000 students on three campuses in Ankara also belong to faculties such as communication science and fine arts, design and architecture and it has a vigorous and media-savvy Centre for Strategic Studies.
But medicine remains the core through a nationwide network of six hospitals, two outpatient clinics, two rehabilitation centres, and eight dialysis centres which is thought to treat around three million patients, including 100,000 in-patients, annually. The network of 20 application and research centres began in Izmir in 1994.
In 2017 the university set up Turkey’s first transplants division, offering two-year training courses in the speciality, and in the following year sponsored an awareness-raising gathering of 438 former transplant patients.
In 2019 the Baskent Health Innovations Centre was set up in partnership with Siemens and the Ankara Development Agency. Recent non-medical research includes the creation an underwater robot capable of working in deep water by Artificial Intelligence Engineers.
