Dr. McGuiggan obtained her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota.  During her Ph.D., she was a research scholar in the Applied Mathematics Department at the Australian National University working with Richard Pashley.  She spent 3 years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara with Professor Jacob Israelachvili.  She has worked at 3M, W.L. Gore & Associates, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.    She is currently an associate research professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University and is P.I. of the Heritage Science for Conservation Program in the Department of Conservation and Preservation at JHU.  Her research focuses on the measurement of material properties at the nanoscale.