Loy Lising is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University and a Senior Fellow with the Higher Education Academy. She is a member of the International Advisory Panel for Migration Linguistics Unit at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Prior to her appointment at Macquarie, she was the Program Director for the Master of Crosscultural Communication program at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney.

In 2015, the Linguistic Society of the Philippines (LSP) awarded Loy the Andrew Gonzalez Distinguished Professorial Chair in Linguistics and Language Education.

Loy is a sociolinguist whose research interest focuses on multilingualism and social participation. She investigates this intersection with a focus on two strands: language features (micro sociolinguistics) and language use (macro sociolinguistics) of multilinguals in both diasporic and homeland contexts particularly in the domains of family, education, health, and law. Employing both corpus and ethnographic approaches, the overarching research questions she asks in her research aim to illuminate our understanding of the sociolinguistic factors that encourage/discourage the maintenance of heritage languages; the identification of language barriers faced by migrants of languages other than English (LOTE) background and the solutions to these for their full social participation; and the linguistic influences of migrant/minority languages on the dominant language and vice versa.