McDermott has won several awards and fellowships throughout her career including the DuPont Young Investigator Award (1992), the Cottrell Scholars Award (1994), the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (1995), the American Chemical Societys Award in Pure Chemistry (1996),  the Eastern Analytic Symposium Award for Achievement in Magnetic Resonance (2005), and the Royal Society of Chemistrys Bourke Award (2014). In 2000, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2006, she was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences.