Nancy Rotzel McInerney maintains the Center for Conservation Genomics laboratory at the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in Washington, D.C. She trains students, collaborators and visiting scientists in genomics for conservation. She also provides assistance to the Zoo’s animal collection with projects such as disease detection, sex identification of newborn animals, and paternity testing for giant pandas.

McInerney has worked on projects as diverse as sequencing mitogenomes of California sea otters, analyzing eDNA in streams to locate endangered freshwater turtles, monitoring Chytrid infections in amphibians around the world, and sequencing DNA of museum specimens.