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SDU University is one of 23 public universities created by the Turkish government in 1992 and is located in the city of Isparta. It has the distinction of being named after someone who was still alive and active. Isparta born Suleyman Demirel was still in his seventh term as prime minister in 1992 and became president from the following year until 2000 and lived until 2015.

He survived almost long enough to see the university grow to the point where the government would consider the possibility, along with other large institutions in 2018, of splitting it into two smaller universities.

Its creation in 1992 reflected a long campaign in the "City of Roses", which had a State Engineering and Architecture Academy from 1976 and in the 1980s designated a campus site in Cunur Village, next to which campaigners raised a banner reading

It designates itself as "the locomotive of Isparta" and as a "young, dynamic and entrepreneurial university which has grown standards".

In 2019 more than 40,000 students, including more than 1,000 from abroad and nearly 6,000 postgraduates, were spread across 15 faculties, three vocational schools, six institutes and two schools. The School of Civil Aviation will admit its first class of 40 students in 2019-20.

The School of Dentistry is among the largest in Turkey. Medically-related research projects, which include a collaboration with the University of Groningen in the Netherlands on the causes of Parkinson¡¯s disease and a scheme to produce bone grafts through 3D printing.

In early 2019 a university academic identified historic tiles that were smuggled out of Turkey more than a century ago when she inadvertently stepped into a store room at London¡¯s Victoria and Albert Museum.