Penn State Law faculty to present at water resources conference

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Lara Fowler, senior lecturer at Penn State Law, will participate in two presentations later this week at the American Water Resources Association (AWRA) Mid-Atlantic Conference, held Sept. 15-16 in Wilmington, Delaware.

The first presentation will be a roundtable discussion on the topic of women in science and AWRA leaders. Other participants in the discussion include: Janet Bowers, Chester County Water Resources Authority and AWRA past president; Carol Collier, Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University and AWRA past president; Kathy Hale, New Jersey Water Supply Authority and NJ-AWRA Section past president; Martha Narvaez, University of Delaware Water Resources Center and current AWRA president; and Jane Rowan, Normandeau Associates, Inc., and AWRA past president.

Fowler’s second presentation at the conference will be a special session entitled “Flood Insurance in the Mid-Atlantic Region: Pennsylvania as a Case Study for Community Scale Impacts of Federal Policies.” Fowler is the lead investigator for a report on flood insurance issues due in early 2017 for the Center for Rural Pennsylvania, a bipartisan, bicameral legislative agency that serves as a resource for rural policy within the Pennsylvania General Assembly. Another project investigator, L. Donald Duke of Florida Gulf Coast University, with a special affiliation with Bucknell University, will also present.

AWRA is a national non-profit professional organization whose mission is to advance multidisciplinary water resources education, management, and research.

Fowler holds a joint appointment at both Penn State Law and the Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment, where she is working on questions related to water, the Chesapeake Bay, and energy. Prior to joining Penn State, she was an attorney at Gordon Thomas Honeywell LLP in Seattle, where she focused on mediation and dispute resolution of complex natural resource issues, as well as representing clients facing regulatory hurdles in the environmental and energy fields. She has worked on issues such as who is entitled to store groundwater in the greater Los Angeles area, flooding issues in the Chehalis Basin (Washington State’s second largest river basin), and energy issues in the Pacific Northwest. Before pursuing a legal career, she was a senior water resources coordinator with the Oregon Water Resources Department.