At Pennsylvania State University (PSU) he earned Master of Surgery in meteorology in 1985 with the thesis On the Development of Boundary Layer Rolls from the Inflection Point Instability and in 1992 a Doctor of Philosophy with the dissertation Southward Burst Mesoscale Convective Systems: An Observational and Modeling Study.
Stensrud earned a Bachelor of Arts in meteorology and mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He joined the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) in 1986 as a research meteorologist and is an adjunct professor at the affiliated University of Oklahoma (OU).
He is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society (American Mathematical Society) and a member of Sigma Xi and Chi Epsilon Pi.
