Vicki Arroyo is Professor from Practice at Georgetown University Law Center where she teaches courses in environmental law, climate change, policy advocacy, and land use. She took leave from Georgetown’s faculty to serve as Associate Administrator for Policy at EPA under President Biden, overseeing work on rulemaking, economic analysis, NEPA, climate adaptation and more. She launched and led Georgetown Climate Center as Executive Director, working with leading states from 2008-2021. Previously she was Vice President for Policy Analysis and General Counsel of the Pew Center on Climate Change, managing the Center’s work on science and impacts, policy analysis, science, adaptation, economics, and U.S. policy programs for a decade, and serving as Managing Editor of the Brill/VSP book Climate Change: Science, Strategies and Solutions.
Arroyo served as Chair of the Executive Committee of the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine from 2019-2020 and on the governing board of the University Consortium for Atmospheric Research. She has also served on advisory boards to the National Science Foundation, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the California Air Resources Board, and the Institute for Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis. She was Policy Director for the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality and Environmental Advisor to Governor Buddy Roemer, crafting innovative policies that reduced air toxics and linked industrial tax exemptions to firms’ environmental records. She has contributed to the development of air quality standards in EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation as well as its Office of Research and Development. She has worked as an Open Space and Recreation Planner in Braintree, MA, and at a New Orleans environmental engineering firm (monitoring oil spill clean-up in the Gulf of Mexico).
Arroyo was elected to membership in the American Law Institute in 2025 and the American College of Environmental Lawyers in 2018. She was selected “Woman of the Year” in 2023 by the Women’s Council on Energy and the Environment. In May 2026, she received the Georgetown Faculty Senate’s Service Award for serving as chair of the university’s contingency development working group.
She holds a BS with high honors in biology from Emory (double major, philosophy), an MPA from Harvard (top honors in her program), and a JD, magna cum laude from Georgetown, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Georgetown International Environmental Law Review.