The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) has been established at Shenzhen University to provide both undergraduate and postgraduate education, focusing on interdisciplinary teaching and research since 2014. As a special platform at Shenzhen University, IAS seeks to

1. build a team consisting of experienced professors with international vision and young teachers with great potential;

2. adopt best-practice management methods used by overseas research universities to foster collaborations with world-class universities in Hong Kong and abroad;

3. create an academic atmosphere and training environment to meet with the international standards with the overall goal of attaining excellence in teaching, research, and management.

IAS fosters the training of innovative talents, cutting-edge scientific research and hi-tech development in the cross fields of marine resources and environment, functional materials, biotechnology, etc. The research outcomes and newly-trained talents will promote the hi-tech industries in Shenzhen, particularly emerging industries of strategic importance such as biology, the Internet, new energy sources, new materials, and next-generation information and communication technology and facilitate the transformation and growth of Shenzhen’s economy.

The IAS has always insisted on recruiting teachers with high selection criteria. Up to now, IAS has more than 40 full-time professors, more than 40 principle investigators, and 97 post-doctoral fellows (including 41 foreigners). Full-time faculty members are employed on the basis of tenured or tenure-tracked positions. All professors, associate professors, and assistant professors should be principal investigators of their own research groups and will be employed, evaluated and promoted in line with the domestic and foreign peer evaluation system. In research evaluation, the quality of contribution to knowledge will be emphasized over simply the quantity of publications. All professors have studied abroad and met the qualifications of Shenzhen's high-level talents (Peacock Project) and the faculty include international academicians, scholars of Chang Jiang Scholars Program, fellows of International Professional Society. In addition, they have got hundreds of projects of the National Natural Science Foundation grants, the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province grants, the Science and Technology Projects of Shenzhen, the High-Caliber Personnel from the Peacock Project, Peacock Group Project and Pearl River's Talent Group Project. Meanwhile, they published hundreds of high-level international academic papers and have been invited to domestic and foreign academic conferences many times.

The IAS has four undergraduate programs in which students can major in mathematics and applied mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biological sciences. The IAS also has three master's programs and one doctoral program. The Innovation Class in Science and Engineering (ICSE) of IAS has enrolled about 90 students each year sine 2014. The initial enrollment scale of postgraduate students is 10 to 30 students per year, and 30-60 students per year for the future, reaching 60-120 postgraduate students. The enrollment scale for doctoral students is 10-30 per year in the initial period, and the enrollment scale is 30 -60 students per year, reaching 120-240 doctoral students at school.

While the student's enrollment scale continues to expand, the IAS continuously improves the quality of teaching. The institute adopts an English-based bilingual teaching mode and provides a large number of international exchange opportunities for students. The IAS also establishes a dual tutor mechanism (academic tutor & professional tutor) to conduct scientific research training for students which achieves good training results. The 2018 and 2019 undergraduate-course graduates published a total of 26 high-level papers in core journals, of which 15 were published in the Chinese Academy of Sciences' JCR first area (the average impact factor is about 7.0). 60% of 2019 undergraduates went to overseas universities to continue their studies, 20% chose to pursue graduate studies in China, 20% entered well-known companies or started their own businesses. Many students were accepted by Oxford University, UC Berkeley, Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, Brown University,  Johns Hopkins University, University College London and other world-renowned schools.