He the senior associate provost and professor of astronomy at New Mexico State University, where he studies the coronal heating problem and space weather.

[2] Dr McAteer was Department chair of Astronomy from 2021-2022, including oversight of Apache Point Observatory and Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

D. from Queen's University Belfast with this thesis Low Frequency Oscillations of the Solar Atmosphere.

He started at New Mexico State University in 2010, and became the director of the newly formed Sunspot Solar Observatory in 2016.

[9] His research includes cross disciplinary papers in image processing, computer vision and big data.