Terra McKinnish获得了博士学位from Carnegie Mellon University in 1999. She a Professor of Economics at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, where she is also a faculty associate in the population program at the CU population center. She has published research on labor market shocks to low-skilled workers, welfare migration, divorce, migration of dual-earner couples, neighborhood gentrification, and marital sorting. Her work has been funded by both the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. In 2010 she was appointed to the board of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) and she currently serves on the board as the Associate Chair and Director of Mentoring.
She joined IZA as a Research Fellow in March 2016.