Prior to joining the faculty at UH, she taught at UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design for nine years. Stilgenbauer is a past-president of the Hawaii Chapter of ASLA. As a registered landscape architect (Germany), she is frequently invited to serve on professional awards juries and has published and lectured widely. In her applied research Judith Stilgenbauer examines the role of process, performance and placemaking in ecological urbanism and public open space design across diverse spatial and temporal scales. In recent years, Stilgenbauer’s work has focused on urban land-water relationships and adaptive design for coastal resilience.