Dr. Maura I. Toro-Morn is the Director of the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at Illinois State University. As a sociologist, she has always been curious about why people move, how, and what are the consequences of their movements thus she has devoted a significant part of her career to studying migrations through a global lens. Her most recent work has appeared in the Centro Journal, the Latino Studies Journal, and various other outlets. She is currently finalizing a book manuscript about Puerto Ricans in Illinois, co-authored with Ivis Garcia Zambrana. She began to address the complexities of migration while researching the social class and gender dimensions of Puerto Rican migration to Chicago. She is part of a generation of scholars that has taken on that task of exploring the gender specific qualities of contemporary migrations, work that has contributed to the historicizing Latino immigration to the Midwest and to making the experiences of women immigrants across diverse geographies visible. Her work contributes to analyzing how gender and race systems of inequality intersect in the recruitment and deployment of Latina women workers. Her first book, Migration and Immigration: A Global View, co-authored with Marixsa Alicea, was published by Greenwood Press in 2004. The book brought together fourteen scholars from around the world to describe and analyze migration issues in regions all over the world. Her second book, Immigrant Women in the Neoliberal Age (Urbana: University of Illinois Press (2013) an edited volume addresses the experiences of Asian and Latina immigrant women workers. Through both her research and teaching, she is devoted to investigating, teaching, and working toward equality for people on issues of ethnicity, race, gender, and social class. This commitment was recognized this year when she was named, ISU’s Outstanding College Researcher in the College of Arts and Sciences. She regularly teaches courses for the Women’s Studies Program and most recently for the Latin American and Latino Studies Program.