KAREN R. VILAS joined BakerRisk in 2007 after graduating with honors from the Univ. of South Carolina, where she earned a degree in chemical engineering and a minor in chemistry. In 2017–2018, she took a leave of absence to pursue a Master of Business Administration (MBA) at the Univ. of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. Globally recognized as a leader in process safety, Vilas has built her career around facility siting studies and quantitative risk analyses for oil, gas, and petrochemical facilities. In 2019, she played a key role in establishing BakerRisk’s Low Carbon Energy service offerings, leading initiatives focused on hydrogen and hydrogen carriers. In August 2022, Vilas was appointed President of FORTRESS Protective Buildings, a wholly owned subsidiary of BakerRisk. In this role, she has drawn on her technical background and client collaboration skills to deliver multi-hazard resistant buildings (MRBs) and other protective solutions that support risk mitigation and management efforts for facilities handling hazardous materials.