She is a professor in the department of biology at University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus where she serves as director of the Center for Applied Tropical Ecology and Conservation.
[3] Her 1975 master's thesis was titled Changes in selected water quality parameters as influenced by land use patterns in the Espiritu Santo drainage basin.
[4] Cuevas completed a Ph.D. in ecology at the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (IVIC) in 1984.
[2] In 2000, Cuevas was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study plant sciences.
[8] In 2019, she became the first Puerto Rican woman named to the Latin American Academy of Science [pt].