McDermott is a professor of chemistry at Columbia University in New York. A member of the National Academy of Science and winner of the 1996 American Chemical Society Award for Pure Chemistry, her research focuses on the use of NMR spectroscopy to study a variety of biological systems, including photosystem reaction centers, peptides and proteins, paramagnetic solids and drug-binding sites and receptors. McDermott was a graduate of John F. Kennedy High School in Wheaton, Md., and received her Ph.D. degree in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in 1987.