Dr. Humes has had the good fortune of having a diverse career both within and outside of academia. She has worked for the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory on space-based geodesy and spacecraft tracking, held a graduate fellowship at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in remote sensing, and served as a Postdoctral Research Assistant at the USDA/Agricultural Research Service Hydrology Lab in Beltsville, MD. Her early research involved field work in remote sensing of land surface characteristics that control land/atmosphere interactions. In this work, she participated in numerous interdisciplinary field campaigns in Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, France and Niger.