The New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study aspires to be one of the world's leading centres for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry in the sciences. The Institute exists to encourage and support fundamental scholarship - the original, often speculative, thinking that produces advances in knowledge - and is characterised by interdisciplinary clusters of elite scholars with the ambition and capability to lead New Zealand's cultivation and generation of knowledge.

It provides for the mentoring of younger scholars by its professoriate, and it offers all who work there the freedom to undertake research that will make significant contributions in any of the broad range of fields in the sciences studied at the Institute.