Lissette is a senior fellow at NORC and professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Social Work. Her research examines healthy aging, with emphasis on caregiving and Hispanic older adults. She integrates sociological theory with applied research to inform policies that support health and well-being of older adults.

As a senior fellow, Lissette contributes her expertise to projects that address healthy aging and caregiving. She is an investigator on the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), a leading study of aging and health in the United States, and was principal investigator for the NIA-funded Latino Aging Caregiver Network Study (LANS), which explored caregiving networks among Hispanic families, including those affected by dementia. This research followed her completion of an administrative supplement to NSHAP that supported her research on the health and well-being of Hispanic older adults in NSHAP. During this time, she gained expertise with the NSHAP dataset and social network analysis, and contributed to the refinement of NSHAP measures, including indicators to detect elder neglect and cognition tools that improve cross-cultural validity for Spanish-speaking older adults.

Lissette has published widely and presented at national conferences on issues of social policy and intervention research. As co-editor in chief of Qualitative Social Work, she has published nearly 30 editorials promoting interpretive approaches in empirical research, and more recently illustrating how the insights can strengthen quantitative research.