As an educational institute, it provides PhD training and scholarship through its English-language Taiwan International Graduate Program in biology, agriculture, chemistry, physics, informatics, and earth and environmental sciences.

[6] Academia Sinica, which means "Chinese Academy",[7] was founded in 1928 in Nanjing, then capital of the Republic of China, with its first meeting held in Shanghai.

[8] Of the 81 inaugural research fellows appointed by the Academia Sinica prior to its move, nine crossed the Taiwan Strait.

At the same time, the mainland part of Academia Sinica remained functioning under Communist rule and was renamed as the Chinese Academy of Sciences in the 1980s.

Academia Sinica's current president is James C. Liao, a biochemist, who replaced Chi-Huey Wong, a biological chemist and the Parsons Foundation Professor and Chair of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, as the 11th president on 21 June 2016.

The fifth president, Yuan T. Lee, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "contributions to the dynamics of chemical elementary processes".

A group of academicians proposed that membership be further restricted to Taiwan passport or national identification card holders.

Academia Sinica has its main campus located in Nangang, Taipei, and runs over 40 research stations distributed across the country and throughout the world.

In addition to the Central Office of Administration and 28 institutes and research centers, the main campus has 10 museums or memorial halls open to the public, as well as an ecological pond, a forest park, a Tudigong temple (Fude Temple 福德宮), and Sifen Creek (四分溪), which runs through the campus and to the north by the National Biotechnology Research Park.

The National Biotechnology Research Park, finished in 2017 and inaugurated in October 2018 by Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen,[14] is located about 500 m north of the main campus and 500 m south of the Nankang Software Park, with the Nangang station to the west and the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center MRT station to the east.

[17] The Southern Campus is part of an effort to promote regional balance in the academic landscape of Taiwan and will prioritize research on agricultural biotechnology, sustainable development, and archaeology of early Taiwanese history and culture.

Students can choose their advisor among a faculty selected for the program out of outstanding researchers and professors appointed at Academia Sinica or at one of the partner universities (or both).

[5] The TIGP offers PhD programs only in selected disciplines agreed upon by Academia Sinica and its national research universities partners.

[27] Its research projects center on the local and cultural history of Taiwan and China, and it organizes conferences and talks, support visiting scholars and students, and hosts EFEO fellows.