In 2015 she received the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Recognition from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
She earned her PhD in physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the area of high-energy astrophysics while working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory's Neutron Science and Technology Group.
[2] She is the initiator and collaborator on the HAWC gamma ray observatory, located on the Sierra Negra volcano in Puebla, Mexico.
[1] The most important result of her work in this area is the discovery of a type of MeV energy emission that has been confirmed by the Fermi Telescope.
[2] As initiator and collaborator on the HAWC observatory, Magdalena González was involved in the discovery of a new pulsar next to the Crab Nebula.