Academics include doctors, scientists, and scholars of all kinds. These characters are masters of the advanced theories, scientific disciplines, and philosophies of the future, their research and work adding to humanity's fantastic progress and achievements. Academics are almost always highly specialized and much sought after. Whether they are privy to the secrets of braintaping or understand the maturation of clones, they have devoted their life to a single field of modern thinking or technology.

Academics can come in many forms, regardless of the discipline they pursue. One could be a Jinteki embryo development technician, able to work on human and clone bodies with equal skill while recognizing the baseline building blocks of their genes simply by looking at their eyes, hair, and skin. Another might hail from one of the Luna Universities with a master's degree in applied AI theory, or they might simply be a street doc, working to keep the rain off their back.

An Academic counts the following skills as career skills: Discipline, Knowledge (Science), Knowledge (Society), Knowledge (The Net), Leadership, Medicine, Melee, and Negotiation. Before spending experience during character creation, an Academic may choose four of their career skills and gain one rank in each of them.