[1] Kavanagh obtained a BSc in Chemical-Physics from Queen's University in 1978, followed by 3 years at Bell Northern Research in Ottawa in their Advanced Technology Laboratory.

She received her PhD in materials science and engineering in 1987 at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

[2] After post doctoral work at IBM and MIT, Kavanagh accepted a faculty position in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept.

She has worked on strain relaxation in lattice-mismatched semiconductor heterostructures, diffusion barriers and electrical contacts for silicon and III-V semiconductor based devices, epitaxial growth and nucleation, and electron transport through thin films and interfaces.

[citation needed] She is a fellow of the Institute of Physics[3] and is the author of over 200 journal papers and conference proceedings, as shown on ORCID.