Erica Kuligowski grew up in Baltimore and Forest Hill, Maryland. She attended high school near a fire station and thought about becoming a firefighter. While attending a program at University of Maryland College Park for women in STEM, Kuligowski watched a demonstration on fire modeling which inspired her to pursue fire protection engineering. Kuligowski earned her B.S. in 2001 and M.S. in 2003 in Fire Protection Engineering from University of Maryland at College Park. She then went on to earn her PhD in Sociology from University of Colorado Boulder in 2011. Her dissertation focused on the behavior of occupants and factors in decision making processes during the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.