Yusuf Leblebici received the BSc and MSc degrees in electrical engineering from Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 1984 and 1986, respectively, and the PhD degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), IL, USA, in 1990. Between 1991 and 2002, he worked as a faculty member at UIUC, at Istanbul Technical University, at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and at Sabancı University. During his appointment at Sabancı University from 1999 to 2002, he served as the Microelectronics Program Coordinator, responsible for establishing and developing the microelectronics diploma program curriculum and the associated teaching laboratories.

In 2002, Yusuf Leblebici became a Chair Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) and Director of the Microelectronic Systems Laboratory which he led for more than 16 years. In November 2018, he was appointed as President of Sabancı University. His research interests include design of high-speed CMOS digital and mixed-signal integrated circuits, computer-aided design of VLSI systems, intelligent sensor interfaces, modeling and simulation of semiconductor devices, and VLSI reliability analysis. So far, he has graduated 58 PhD students and more than 100 MSc students. He is the coauthor of nine books (including two internationally acclaimed textbooks), as well as more than 350 scientific articles published in various journals and conferences. His textbook entitled “CMOS Digital Integrated Circuits: Analysis and Design" which was first published by McGraw Hill in 1995 has resulted in 4 consecutive editions through the years, with more than 250,000 copies printed worldwide, and translated into 3 languages including Chinese.

Yusuf Leblebici has been the recipient of the prestigious Young Scientist Award of the Turkish Scientific and Technological Research Council in 1995, and the "Joseph S. Satin Distinguished Fellow Award" in 1999. He was elected as an IEEE Fellow in 2009, and as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society for 2010–2011. In 2020, Yusuf Leblebici has received the Electrical and Computer Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and in 2023, he was elected as a Member of Academia Europaea.