For the 2017-2018 academic year, she was on leave at the White House Council of Economic Advisers serving as the senior labor economist and then as the chief domestic economist. Wanamaker is also a Kinney Family Faculty Fellow, a Center for Business and Economic Research (CBER) Fellow, and the BB&T Scholar in Markets, Capitalism and Ethics in the Haslam College of Business. Her research interests include American economic history, education, health, demography, and labor economics. She completed her PhD at Northwestern University in 2009 and has been on faculty at the University of Tennessee ever since.