Javier Ullán has a multidisciplinary profile in the four main pillars of the academic career:1)Education: BA in Geography and History (Complutense), Msc. in Social Anthropology (London School of Economics), PhD. in Political Science and Sociology(Complutense), Postgraduate Studies in Communication Research Techniques (Veracruzana).2)Teaching experience: full-time professor in departments of Social Anthropology, Communication Sciences and Sociology at Veracruzana, Autónoma de San Luis Potosí, UNED and Alicante universities and visiting professor in the UK, France, Italy, Ecuador, Chile, Brazil, Guatemala, Benin and India.3) Research: a great variety of topics from acculturation processes, millenarian religions (the Amazonian Cruzados or the Amalia Bautista movement in Mexico), Spanish migration policies, Urban Sociology, post-post-modern social movements, higher education among Spanish Roma, indianist political ideology, or social impacts of community-based tourism. 4)  Knowledge transfer: encyclopedia articles (Planeta and Salvat), advisor to an anthropological museum, work for a UN food program in Sierra Leone, consultant for asylum seekers at the British NGO Asylum Welcome, specialist in political participation of Indigenous peoples electoral observation missions of the Organization of American States, Lead Researcher of projects on Roma and higher education.

Beneath this wide diversity of activities runs a common thread that Professor Ullán has never abandoned: the focus on the ethnic/identity dimension of social relations, that is present in most of his works: his studies on multidimensional social change amongst Latin American indigenous groups, his forays into the study of African societies, his studies on ethnically biased migration policies, of the role of ethnic identity on the peacebuilding activities of certain migrant diasporas in Europe, on postmodern identity-based social movements and political movements and Indianist ideologies in Latin America, his research on education and Roma ethnicity and his most recent research on indigenous universities.