Min Zhou is Professor of Sociology & Asian American Studies, Walter and Shirley Wang Endowed Chair in U.S.-China Relations & Communications, and Director of the UCLA Asia Pacific Center. She is an internationally renowned scholar in the areas of migration and development, race and ethnicity, entrepreneurship, refugee studies, Asian diasporas, and the sociology of Asia and Asian America. She has published 19 books and more than 200 journal articles and book chapters. She is the author of Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave (1992), Contemporary Chinese America: Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community Transformation (2009), and The Accidental Sociologist in Asian American Studies (2011); co-author of Growing up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States (with Bankston, 1998), The Asian American Achievement Paradox (with Lee, 2015), and The Rise of the New Second Generation (with Bankston, 2016); and editor of Contemporary Chinese Diasporas (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) and co-editor of Contemporary Asian America with Ocampo, 3rd ed. 2016).
Professor Zhou is co-Editor of the Journal of Chinese Overseas. She was the President of the North American Chinese Sociologist Association, Chair of the Section on Asia and Asian America of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and Chair of the Section on International Migration of ASA. She is the recipient of the 2017 Distinguished Career Award of the ASA Section on International Migration and the 2020 Contribution to the Field Award, Section on Asia and Asian America.
Between 2013 and 2016, she took a leave of absence to be the Tan Lark Sye Chair Professor, Head of Sociology Division, and Director of the Chinese Heritage Centre, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She also held the prestigious Chang Jiang Scholar Chair Professorship at Sun Yat-sen University, China (2009-2012). She currently holds visiting Professorships in several major universities in China, including Sun Yat-sen University, Zhejiang University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Huazhong Agricultural University, and Lishui College.
Currently, Prof. Zhou is working on four projects: “Immigration, Integration and Social Transformation in the Pacific Rim,” “Inter-group relations and racial attitudes among Chinese locals and African merchants in Guangzhou and Yiwu, China,” “Chinese immigrant transnationalism and hometown development,” and “Highly skilled Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles and Singapore.” She is writing a book (with Shaohua Zhan) on contemporary Chinese and Indian immigrants in Los Angeles, Vancouver, and Singapore.