Pamela Chelgren-Koterba was born in 1950 in Annapolis, Maryland, and raised at various locations in the United States.

[1] She was the third of seven children of Captain John Chelgren, a career U.S. Navy officer who served as the technical director of the anti-air warfare ship acquisition project (1969–1972), and Ruth Henderson, an opera singer.

[1][3][4] At Berkeley, she worked at the Space Sciences Laboratory, where she was responsible for checking data tapes for the OGO 5 satellite.

[1] In October 1977, Chelgren – then a lieutenant – was made operations officer aboard the 162-foot (49 m) hydrographic survey ship NOAAS Peirce, what was then the highest shipboard posting ever held by a woman in any of the Uniformed Services of the United States.

[6] She later went to work as a Crisis Readiness Manager for Alyeska Pipeline Service Company (1996-2006), thence a planner and on-call responder for Witt O'Brien's (an oil spill management company), and a planner and on-call Incident Commander for the Washington State Maritime Cooperative, a hybrid public-private organization coordinating oil spill response in Washington state.