Professor McDermott has taught courses at the undergraduate, graduate, and executive levels while at Rensselaer, and as a visiting faculty member at other schools. He has won multiple awards for his teaching.
 
Professor McDermott’s primary research interests focus on the link between the operations function and the overall goals of the organization, showing the strategic importance of operational decisions to overall competitiveness. His research falls into three main areas. 1) The alignment between operational decisions and the organization’s stated competitive priorities, 2) the role of operational decisions on innovation performance, and 3) the effective use of operations management concepts in the health care sector.  He has published more than one hundred research papers in academic journals and conference proceedings, and his research has more than 5,000 citations. 
 
His work has been published in such outlets as the Journal of Operations Management, Decision Sciences, Journal of Product Innovation Management, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, International Journal of Production Research, International Journal of Production Economics, and the Journal of High Technology Management Research.
 
Professor McDermott has served as an associate editor for the Journal of Operations Management and recently completed his three-year term on the editorial review board of Decision Sciences. He currently sits on the editorial review board of the International Journal of Services and Operations Management.
 
Prior to joining Rensselaer, Professor McDermott worked as an engineer at the Westinghouse Electric Company, and also at the Fairchild Space Company, where he was an on-site contractor at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.