With a demonstrated history of collaborative reform with hundreds of police departments across the U.S., McGough is one of the country’s leading facilitators of police practitioner partnerships.

McGough began her career as an attorney at the US Department of Justice, originally as a Special Assistant US Attorney for the District of Columbia.  Through this work, she became engaged in research and policy through the National Institute of Justice, where she ultimately served as a senior policy advisor for most of her career.  Her portfolios included improving law enforcement responses to human trafficking, preventing wrongful convictions, facilitating system-wide reform efforts, optimizing counter-poaching operations in Kenya, coordinating federal AIDS relief efforts in Rwanda through the US Department of State, and advancing evidence-based policing in the US.  McGough conceptualized and launched the Law Enforcement Advancing Data and Science (LEADS) program to support research-minded law enforcement professionals, now a multi-million dollar program in its tenth year.  She also served as counsel on terrorism prevention to the Deputy Attorney General of the United States and represented the U.S. before the United Nations Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice.

McGough left the federal government after a decade of service to hold leadership positions in several non-profits advancing the police profession and collaborative reform.  She served as the Director of National Programs and Research at the National Policing Institute and as Chief of Strategic Initiatives at the Policing Project at NYU School of Law.  Her work focused largely on establishing and evaluating basic minimum standards for police departments regarding fairness and equity, operational management, internal and external accountability, and effectiveness of public safety strategies. 

In November of 2023, she joined the Excellence in Policing and Public Safety Program (EPPS) as their founding executive director.  She also holds a part-time appointment as a senior advisor on policing issues with the Bureau of Justice Assistance at the US Department of Justice.  She regularly writes for practitioner publications including Translational Criminology, the NIJ Journal and Police Chief, and her scholarly publications include Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, the Journal of Community Safety and Wellbeing, and book chapters in Transforming Criminal Justice (2022) and Police Unions and the Reform Movement (2022). 

McGough also co-founded the 30x30 Initiative to Advance Women in Policing, a national grassroots effort to improve the representation and experiences of women in policing and raise the representation of women to 30% in police recruit classes by the year 2030.  Built from scratch with no initial funding, the Initiative is now a multi-million dollar effort that boasts partnerships with over 400 law enforcement agencies across the country, including NYPD, LAPD, and the FBI.  Her work on gender equity has been featured in The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, USA Today, Slate, Vox Media, ABC News, and Cosmopolitan among others.    

McGough is an attorney and earned her JD from the George Washington University School of Law.  She serves on the advisory board for the FBI’s Law Enforcement Education and Training Council, the American Society of Evidence-Based Policing, the US Department of Justice’s Police Knowledge Lab, and the Policing Leadership Academy at the University of Chicago.  She is a Brookings Public Leadership Executive Fellow.