Mette is a social anthropologist with research interests in migration, diasporas and migrant transnationalism; urban diversity; gender, belonging and generation; and social memory. Regionally, she specialises in Cuba and the wider Caribbean and Latin American region, and London and the UK. She is Professor of Migration and Diaspora Studies at the Thomas Coram Research Institute, UCL Social Research Institute.

She is the author of Diasporic Generations: Memory, Politics and Nation among Cubans in Spain (Berghahn, 2011), and co-editor of Ethnography, Diversity and Urban Space (Routledge, 2015), originally published as a special issue of the journal Identities (2013), and of Studying Diversity, Migration and Urban Multiculture (UCL Press, 2019). Mette has also co-edited a double special issue of the journal Diaspora, titled Re-Imagining Diasporas and Generation (2015).

Mette is Principal investigator (PI) on a 3-year international, comparative research project on Migrants and Solidarities: Negotiating Deservingness in Welfare Micropublics, funded by Nordforsk 2020-2023. See https://solidarities.net/.

She is the co-editor, with Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh of UCL Geography, of the journal Migration and Society. She is co-director of the UCL Migration Research Unit with Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Jo Waters. 

Servicing Super-Diversity: Mette held an ESRC IAA Knowledge Exchange Fellowship in 2014-15, working with Southwark Council in London. 

Mette was a visiting researcher at the Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen in the autumn of 2018.