Hongdeng received her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2023. She is a historian of race and ethnicity, migration, public health, and social movements in modern America. Her first book project examines how Cold War geopolitics and cross-ethnic grassroots alliances improved access to healthcare for underserved Chinese New Yorkers. Her second project is a comparative study of the medical education and healthcare experiences of Asian American, Black and Latinx health professionals and patients in post-World War II New York City—with a focus on the South Bronx and the Lower East Side. Hongdeng's research integrates Asian American history into better known histories of Black and Latinx urban communities. It also underscores the positive legacies of grassroots, community-based initiatives, and offers fruitful models for working with marginalized individuals of color today. Drawing from archival data, rare personal papers, and oral history interviews with physicians and community activists, Hongdeng's work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, the Library of Congress, and the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, among others.