Ulrich Brückner studied Political Science, German Literature and History at the University of Würzburg and the Freie Universität Berlin (FU Berlin). Since 1987 he is specialized on European integration.

From 1992 until 2002 Uli Brückner worked at the Department for Political Sciences at the FU Berlin as lecturer and later as the Jean Monnet chair, an EU program for teaching activities in the field of European Integration.
His Ph.D. is on the role of the European Commission in the policy-making of the EU. From 1997 until 2003 he also worked as a Jean Monnet visiting professor at Szczecin University in Poland.

Since 1999 Uli Brückner taught as visiting professor at Stanford University Berlin and California, ECNU and Fudan University in Shanghai, MGIMO Moscow, Sabanci University in Istanbul, University of Economics in Bratislava and the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. 2003 he became EU Jean Monnet Professor at Stanford and works in California in spring and in the Berlin program in fall / winter.

Uli Brückner is a member of TEAM Europe, the expert service of the European Union and he works with the International Training for Diplomats Programme of the German Federal Foreign Office.

His current fields of interests are institutional developments in the EU, cultural policy, external affairs and Eastward enlargement.