Eugenia Kalnay completed her Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under Jule Charney and became the first woman on the faculty in the Department of Meteorology. In 1979, she moved to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, where she developed the fourth-order global numerical model and led experiments in the new science called 'data assimilation.' In 1984, she became Head of NASA's Global Modeling and Simulation Branch. In 1987, she became Director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Environmental Modeling Center, where many improvements of models and data assimilation were developed for the National Weather Service forecasts. Her paper 'The NCEP/NCAR 40-year reanalysis project' (Kalnay et al., 1996) is the most cited paper in geosciences. In 1997, Kalnay became Lowry Chair at the University of Oklahoma and in 1999 became Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences Department Chair and professor at the University of Maryland, where she was later elected a Distinguished University Professor.
