He received his PhD from the University of Chicago and did a postdoc at the Center for Vital Longevity at the University of Texas at Dallas. In his first year as faculty, he received the Matilda White Riley Early Stage Investigator Honors from the National Institutes of Health and was accepted into the highly competitive Butler-Williams Scholars Program at the National Institute on Aging. McDonough's current research focuses on the neural correlates of memory and how they differ with old age. More recently, he's begun investigating how the brain differs in middle-aged and older adults at risk for Alzheimer's disease, with a particular focus on racial/ethnic health disparities. This work has garnered him the 2017 Charles Barkley Health Disparities Research Investigator Award.