Jose Elias-Ulloa's research focus is Amazonian Linguistics. As part of his research, he travels to the indigenous communities in the lowlands of South America in order to collect and analyze linguistic data from endangered languages, particularly those of the Panoan linguistic family, spoken in the Amazon region of Peru and Brazil. He has applied for and been awarded research funds that have enabled him to travel to areas where Shipibo and Capanahua are spoken and to record data first hand. Some of the languages in this group are bordering on extinction (for example, Capanahua, which he focuses on in several articles and research projects is currently in severe danger of disappearing within a generation); others have already become extinct (for example, Huariapano, which he uses in some of his analyses, and which was last reported to have been spoken in 1991). He considers an intrinsic part of his research agenda to be the thorough documentation of the sound systems of these Latin American endangered languages before they die out, not only because they form part of humanity’s cultural heritage, but also because they provide invaluable and irreplaceable data that shed light on and often demand a revision of the linguistic theories.