Yunnan University will build a disciplinary system to serve national strategies and Yunnan's development. Relying on Yunnan's three major advantages of ethnic and cultural diversity, biodiversity and a good geographical location bordering to South and Southeast Asia, the university will fully integrate its disciplinary resources and promote "two transformations"–to transform the resources and regional advantages into discipline advantages and then transform them into talent cultivation advantages. 

The school plans to construct a promoted disciplinary system of first-class disciplines, top disciplines, "plateau" disciplines, basic disciplines and emerging interdisciplinary. Five first-class disciplines or groups consisting of ethnology, plateau mountain ecology and global environment discipline group, borderland governance and geopolitics discipline group, life and molecular science disciplines, and astronomy will be the university’s primary focus. These efforts will likely support the country's major national scientific layout, construction of ecological security barrier and border control, and national governance, as well as Yunnan's key industries including biological industry, big health industry and cultural industry.