Kaymakçalan was born in Konya in 1925. She completed her primary education in different Anatolian cities because his father was a civil servant in State Railways. After graduating from American College for Girls , she entered İstanbul University Faculty of Medicine in 1943. She started to work at Ankara University Faculty of Medicine in 1950 as the first female assistant. Kaymakçalan, who had gone to the United States in 1951 as one of the first Fulbright grantees, worked in Dr. Richard Bing’s cardiology lab in Alabama. After returning to Turkey, she founded the Heart Catheterization-Hemodynamics Lab in Ankara. One of the founders of the Turkish Cardiology Association, she became professor in 1965 and the chairperson of the Cardiology Department at Ankara University Medical Faculty in 1987. Kaymakçalan, who also served as the private physician of former President İsmet İnönü, retired in 1991. Her Fulbright adventure, which reportedly started with a small advertisement in the American Library in the early 1950s, has inspired hundreds of scientists for almost seventy years.