Kelly Balmes is a 2013 Hollings Undergraduate Scholarship alumna who is now a research scientist in NOAA Research’s Global Monitoring Laboratory at the University of Colorado at Boulder Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES/NOAA GML) offsite link. As a scholar, her internship focused on evaluating how clouds affect radiation. What she learned during her internship still applies to her work today — one of her current projects investigates how solar energy varies due to different cloud types to inform solar energy forecasting. Another project informs how interactions between clouds and radiation can be represented in weather prediction models. Below, Kelly answers a few questions about her Hollings Scholarship experience and her career path.