Carmen earned her PhD in physics from the University of Bremen, Germany in 2009 under the advisement of Prof. Dirk Olbers at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Science. She joined NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a postdoctoral scholar in 2009 and became a Research Scientist at the Lab in 2011. At JPL, she served in several different roles including Group Supervisor for the Sea Level and Ice Group and Deputy Section Manager of the Earth Science Section. Her work focused primarily on Earth System Science and understanding the interconnection between components using remote sensing observations. In 2015, she became the Project Scientist of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission, which measure gravity fluctuations on Earth that can be used to understand large-scale ocean circulation and in general the Earth's water cycle including groundwater anomalies. In 2026, Carmen joined the research team at SSI to further Earth System Science and its "real-world" applications.
Carmen's primary research interests revolve around nature-based solutions and how science and data can be utilized to study impacts and co-benefits as well as supporting scaling solutions across bioregions and watersheds. She is currently part of the NASA Disasters Science Team working on a project that supports communities to build resilience through regenerative agriculture and part of NASA's Coastal Resilience Science Team to study impacts of coastal processes such as coastal darkening on kelp regeneration and marine kelp cultivation.