Suzanne P McKee earned her AB degree in 1963 from Vassar College. She went on to earn her Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of California Berkeley in 1970. The following year, she joined Polaroid Corporation as a scientist. In 1974, she returned to the University of California Berkeley as an assistant research physiologist. Since 1981, she has been senior scientist at The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute. She is active in the community, and has served on a number of editorial boards and committees.

She is a Fellow of OSA, and both an Honorary Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a National Science Foundation Fellow. In 2014, she received OSA’s Edgar D. Tillyer Award “for contributions to fundamental understanding of visual motion and of normal and abnormal human stereo vision, revealing the limits and character of brain mechanisms responsible for the perception of depth.”