Originally from New Hampshire, Stephanie Pilkington is a civil engineer by training, receiving her Ph.D. and M.S. from Colorado State University and B.S. from Virginia Tech, and is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has previously worked for the U.S. Air Force as an Environmental Restoration Program Manager (civilian). Her core research interests relate to meteorological natural hazards and how they affect communities. Her expertise is in community resilience to natural hazards and modeling hazard impact and recovery on a systems level. She has created multiple models using machine learning and artificial neural networks. Pilkington has also participated in damage surveys and is an avid storm chaser.