Doug Nychka started his career as a Professor in Statistics at North Carolina State University in 1983 before he moved to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) as a senior scientist in 1997. His research areas cover splines, inverse problems, spatial statistics, Bayesian methods, nonparametric regression, statistical computing, and spatial designs. He has made outstanding and sustained contributions to the statistical sciences, both theory and practice, atmospheric science, climatology, environmetrics and the geosciences. He is a leading expert on interdisciplinary research that covers many aspects of atmospheric sciences from ocean winds to dispersion of pollutants, from design of monitoring networks to data assimilation in precipitation models, and from assessment of model fits to climate change. In recognition of his internationally renowned contributions in interdisciplinary research, he was the recipient of the Jerry Sacks Award for Multidisciplinary Research in 2004. He has published in top statistical journals as well as top geophysical journals. He has written two books that integrate statistics and atmospheric and environmental sciences, and has developed an R package "fields" together with a new book. Both have been used widely in statistical climatology studies.

His contributions to statistics and climatology are multiple. As the director of Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences at NCAR, Doug Nychka is also heavily invested in mentoring young statisticians, successfully teaching them how to carry mathematical methods and models to atmospheric science and climatology. He has given invited lectures at various international conferences. He has served as Associate Editor for six statistical journals and he has been the Chair of the Scientic Advisory Panel for Center for Integrating Statistics and Environmental Sciences at the University of Chicago since 2003. Doug Nychka also served on the Committee for Applied and Theoretical Statistics, Board on Mathematical Sciences of The National Academies.