She received her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in geological sciences from Brown University. She received a Urey Fellowship as a postdoctoral scholar at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, and most recently had been a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology. Her research interests include elemental partitioning in terrestrial and extraterrestrial igneous processes and the behavior and chemistry of magmas in the Earth’s crust. She has published in several peer-reviewed journals and has been involved in research laboratories at Cal Tech, the Johnson Space Center and Brown University. McCanta also taught for a year at Pomona College.