Georgetown Law

Vicki Arroyo is currently on leave from Georgetown while serving as the Associate Administrator for Policy at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Prior to her leave, she served as the Executive Director of the Georgetown Climate Center based at Georgetown University Law Center, where she is also a Professor from Practice. Professor Arroyo served as Special Advisor to the President of Georgetown University, and was previously Law Center’s Assistant Dean of Centers and Institutes.

Professor Arroyo oversees the Georgetown Climate Center’s work at the nexus of climate and energy policy, supervising staff and student work on climate mitigation and adaptation at the state and federal level. She teaches “experiential” environmental law courses to both law and public policy students. She is also a member of the faculty steering committee for the Georgetown Environment Initiative, a cross-campus effort to advance the interdisciplinary study of the environment in relation to society, scientific understanding, and sound policy.

Professor Arroyo served as the Law Center’s first Environmental Law Program Director where she helped develop and launch a new Environmental Law LLM degree program and oversaw all aspects of the program including admissions of students, counseling, and curricular development from 2013 – 2015 and still works closely with the program’s Director.

She previously served at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, including as the Pew Center’s Vice President for Domestic Policy and General Counsel. For over a decade, she directed the Pew Center’s domestic policy program as well as managing the Center’s work on science, environmental impacts, adaptation, and economics. Professor Arroyo served as Managing Editor of the Center’s book, Climate Change: Science, Strategies, and Solutions.

In addition to teaching at Georgetown Law, she has taught courses on environmental policy and climate change at Catholic University, George Mason University’s graduate public policy program, and Tulane Law School. Previously, she practiced environmental law with Kilpatrick Stockton in Washington DC and other firms and served in two offices at U.S. EPA: the Office of Air and Radiation and the Office of Research and Development, where she reviewed development of standards under the Clean Air Act. From 1988 to 1991, she created and directed the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality’s policy office, and also served during some of that period as Governor Buddy Roemer’s environmental advisor.

Professor Arroyo currently serves as Chair of the Executive Committee of the National Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the National Academy of Sciences and chaired TRB’s Resilience and Sustainability Task Force. She serves on the Board of Advisors of the Institute of Transportation at UC Davis, and has testified before the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works on steps that states and cities are taking to reduce greenhouse gas pollution from transportation and to make communities more resilient to the serious consequences of climate change. She previously served for seven years on the Advisory Board to the National Science Foundation’s Geosciences Directorate, and for three years on the Board of Trustees to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. She helped develop California’s cap-and-trade system as a member of California’s Economics and Allocation Advisory Committee. She has also held positions on the external advisory committee to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and on several other federal panels, including those reviewing economic modeling of climate legislation (DOE’s Energy Information Administration) and on climate change adaptation along the Gulf Coast (Climate Change Science Program). She is Associate Editor of the journal Climate Policy and a member of the editorial board for The Georgetown Environmental Law Review (formerly The Georgetown International Law Review). In 2018, Professor Arroyo was elected to the American College of Environmental Lawyers (ACOEL).

She holds a B.S. in biology, high honors, from Emory (double major in philosophy); a Masters of Public Administration from Harvard (receiving the Don K. Price award for academic achievement and commitment to public service, the top honors in her program), and a J.D., magna cum laude, from Georgetown Law, where she was Editor-in-Chief of The Georgetown International Environmental Law Review.