McGuinness received a Bachelor of Surgery in math and computer science from Duke University, a masters degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science from Rutgers University in 1996.
She is working in the field of artificial intelligence, specifically in knowledge representation and reasoning, description logics, the semantic web, explanation, and trust. Prior to coming to Stanford, she was in the Artificial Intelligence Research Departments at American Telephone & Telegraph Company Bell Labs and American Telephone & Telegraph Company Labs Research at Murray Hill and Florham Park, respectively. She was co-director and senior research scientist at the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University.
In October 2007 she became faculty at RPI, where she joined another well known semantic web expert, James Hendler on the Tetherless World Research Constellation.
In November, 2013, McGuinness was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
