Professor López is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Department of History. She specializes in the historical intersections between Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean. Her book Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History examines Chinese migrants in Cuba from the mid-nineteenth century to the present through archival and ethnographic research in Cuba, China, and the United States and received the 2014 Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize of the Caribbean Studies Association. She is currently working on two projects, one on Chinese migrants, gender, and citizenship across Caribbean societies in the twentieth century (with a focus on Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago) and the other on the diversity of the Cuban diaspora in the United States (including Chinese Cubans). She is also collaborating on the Rutgers Latino Memory Project to recover the history of the department and Latinx people at the university. Professor López is a former co-chair and longtime member of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Section on Asia and the Americas. At Rutgers, she is involved with the SAS Global Asias Initiative, the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Latino Studies Research Initiative. She was a Faculty Fellow for the 2015-2016 Center for Cultural Analysis Archipelagoes Seminar. She is also an editor of two book series: Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, with Ignacio López-Calvo (Palgrave Macmillan) and Critical Caribbean Studies, with Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Carter Mathes (Rutgers University Press).