[3][4] McNamara's research focuses on the preservation of soft tissues in the fossil record, fossil colour, and feather evolution through the use of laboratory analytical techniques, including FTIR, Raman spectroscopy, SEM, TEM, synchrotron-XRF and XANES.
Furthermore, controlled laboratory-based taphonomic experiments that simulate aspects of the fossilization process are done to illustrate how information on biological structures and chemistry is lost during decay and diagenesis, and help to predict what sort of information is likely to preserve in fossils.
In 2007 she was awarded a PhD by University College Dublin (UCD) in 2007 with a thesis focusing on taphonomy.
[5] She returned to academia in 2009 after being awarded a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University.
[3] In 2016 McNamara was one of the eight women to be painted by Blaise Smith in honour of being the recipient of European Research Council Starter Grants.