İstanbul Yeni Yüzyıl Üniversitesi was established on 19 February 2009 under Law No. 5839 of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, under the auspices of the Vatan Health and Education Foundation (Vatan Sağlık ve Eğitim Vakfı — VASEV). The roots of the foundation go back to 1974, when Dr. Azmi Ofluoğlu — one of the most influential figures in Turkey's private healthcare — laid the foundations of what would become the country's first private clinic network, including the famous Vatan hospital group, the historic German Hospital (Alman Hastanesi) and the Italian Hospital in Istanbul. These institutions played a decisive role in shaping modern Turkish private healthcare and earned an impeccable reputation for clinical excellence. Drawing on decades of experience in medicine, hospital management and medical education, VASEV took the strategic decision to channel its capacity into higher education, which led to the creation of İstanbul Yeni Yüzyıl Üniversitesi.
The university began its first academic year in 2010–2011, enrolling 860 students across seven faculties and two vocational schools. From the very beginning, the institution was built around a clear vision: to be a research university producing globally competitive specialists while remaining faithful to ethical principles and the secular ideals of Atatürk. By the 2018–2019 academic year, Yeni Yüzyıl had grown to ten faculties — Medicine, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Law, Fine Arts, Economics and Administrative Sciences, Health Sciences, Science and Letters, Communications, Engineering and Architecture, Sports Sciences — and also included two vocational schools, three graduate institutes, 27 bachelor's programs, 25 associate-degree programs and more than a dozen master's and doctoral programs. The teaching staff grew to nearly 600 people, including 96 professors, 30 associate professors and 188 senior lecturers.
The campus infrastructure reflects the university's medical DNA. The Dr. Azmi Ofluoğlu main campus in the Topkapı district includes a seven-storey main building of 37,445 m² and a ten-storey annex of 20,000 m² with lecture halls, seminar rooms and administrative spaces. The Cevizlibağ campus houses the Life Sciences and Technology Lab, as well as a forensic-sciences laboratory, where interdisciplinary projects are carried out in medicine, molecular biology, biomedical engineering, dietetics and forensic genetics. The Faculty of Dentistry occupies a separate eight-storey building in the Sütlüce-Halıcıoğlu district, with eight clinics housing 60 dental units, a central sterilization unit, an operating room, an emergency unit and a conference hall — a total of 3,800 m². The pearl of the clinical ecosystem is the Gaziosmanpaşa hospital campus, which covers 59,827 m² and includes 117 outpatient departments, 12 operating rooms, 254 wards and 336 beds. In 2017, the hospital was granted Joint Commission International (JCI) accreditation, confirming compliance with the highest global standards of patient safety and care quality.
Internationalization has been a priority for Yeni Yüzyıl from its very first days. The university obtained the Erasmus Charter in the year of its founding, which allows students to spend one or two semesters in 46 European countries. Today the university maintains 77 bilateral Erasmus+ partnerships with universities in Italy, Spain, Greece, Germany, Portugal, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Belgium, Hungary, Czechia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Lithuania, Slovenia and Slovakia, and also has memoranda of understanding with universities on other continents. Vibrant extracurricular life complements the academic side: more than 49 student clubs cover areas from science and technology to art and sports, ensuring that students develop in many different ways far beyond the lecture halls.