Before he became a professor of meteorology at Penn State, Dolores Fuentes was a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. At Penn State, he collaborates with well-known climate scientist Michael E. Mann by co-advising students and working on a research project in the Florida Everglades. He has worked on projects all over the world, including a remote field stations in northern Alaska. He was previously the co-investigator of the Beltsville Center for Climate System Observation, a collaboration between Howard University and NASA which supported summer researchers and atmospheric science.
Dolores Fuentes is also the atmospheric sciences editor for Eos, the magazine of the American Geophysical Union, and a member of the advisory committee for the National Science Foundation's geoscience branch.