[2] She is a senior research scientist in the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is head of the Sustainable Water Resources Program.
[5] She earned a master's degree at the University of Alabama in 1983,[6] with a master's thesis based on her field work in the basin of the River Maine in Ireland,[5] and completed a PhD at the University of Kentucky in 1985,[6] studying the karst landscape of the inner Bluegrass region of Kentucky.
[5] After briefly working at a consulting firm, she joined the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin in 1987.
[6] She was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2016 "for contributions to the evaluation of groundwater recharge and aquifer depletion".
It stated that the first two made Scanlon "the leading global expert on groundwater recharge", while the second two demonstrated her more recent interest in climate change and sustainability, and included pioneering work in the water resources used by hydraulic fracturing:[9]