Professor Mahowald has undergraduate degrees in German and physics from Washington University, an M.S. in natural resource policy from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. in meteorology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mahowald conducted her postdoctoral research at Stockholm University in Sweden prior to holding a faculty position at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 1998-2002. She then spent five years as a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) before joining Cornell as a faculty member in 2007.