Legal and Ethics of Tech 

Lauren Schramm 
Senior Transportation Planner
Environmental Science Associates

Lauren Schramm
As a Senior Transportation Planner at ESA, Lauren serves as an advisor to the firm’s clients on modernizing environmental review and decision-making processes. Her work supports clients as they navigate evolving federal requirements while advancing infrastructure and public-sector priorities efficiently and transparently.

Lauren is recognized for her leadership at the intersection of environmental policy and technology-enabled process improvement. She led a team that created an AI chatbot that won the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Modernizing NEPA Challenge, a national initiative focused on identifying innovative approaches to improve the efficiency, transparency, and effectiveness of the National Environmental Policy Act process. Building on this work, Lauren leads the National Association of Environmental Professionals Working Group on Technology. Lauren works closely with several federal and state agencies in this space and has been published alongside the National Labs.

Lauren holds a Master of Science in Wildlife and Fisheries Resources from Clemson University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Biology and Environmental Studies from Alfred University. She has been recognized with a 2025 Emerging Environmental Professional Achievement Award from the Academy of Board Certified Environmental Professionals, and named as one of the 35 Women Under 35 To Know by the American Council of Engineering Companies of Georgia.

Speakers

Pam Danko, Esq.
Environmental Attorney,
Hudson Danko Engineering

Pam (Hudson) Danko is a member of NAEP, and a nationally known NEPA attorney and specialist providing extensive NEPA compliance services to federal agencies and private entities. She is the author of the Annual NEPA Case Law Review (2014 – Present) and has authored eighteen federal agency, academic, and peer-reviewed articles. She recently started her own disabled veteran-owned small business, specializing in all aspects of compliance with NEPA.

Mrs. Danko retired from the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Chief Counsel after serving a long tenure with the Department of the Navy’s Office of General Counsel. Her previous experience includes serving as a senior environmental law attorney with the FAA’s Airports and Environmental Law HQ branch, and as a Deputy Counsel for Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command Southwest, supervising legal teams in acquisition, labor and employment, real estate, and environmental. Earlier in her career, she led the Navy’s environmental law and NEPA training program.

Pam provided legal sufficiency and technical reviews on projects involving airport development, transportation, construction, real estate actions, grants, acquisition actions, and commercial space transportation. She supported the Department of Justice litigating federal NEPA claims and advised on and drafted agency NEPA regulations and policy.

Mrs. Danko is a retired U.S. Navy Commander (Oceanography) and is an alumna of Florida State University College of Law, where she was the Beverly Stout McLear Environmental and Land Use Scholar. 

Fred Wagner
Principal Environmental Advisor
Jacobs

Fred Wager focuses on environmental and natural resource issues, associated with major infrastructure, mining, and energy project development. He has worked on complex environmental reviews from his very first day at the U.S. Department of Justice Environment Division in 1987 until his recent arrival at Jacobs in March 2025. Over the course of his career, he has partnered with public agencies and private developers across all major sectors of the American economy to help prepare excellent NEPA documents and to defend those documents in court. Fred has worked on the successful completion of environ-mental assessments and environmental impact statements for major highway, bridge, freight and passenger rail, and transit projects, proposals to expand domestic mining production, urban sports facilities and arenas, onshore and off-shore renewable and traditional energy development, forest and rangeland management plans, and the development of a new Presidential Center in Chicago. Most recently, Fred was counsel of record in the consequential Supreme Court NEPA case, Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, 605 U.S. ---, 145 S.Ct. 1497 (2025).

He served as Chief Counsel of the U.S. Federal Highway Administration from 2010-2014. In that capacity, he helped lead inter-agency efforts to reform NEPA reviews and project permitting. Those efforts led to substantial legislative and regulatory accomplishments reflected in transportation reauthorization bills (MAP-21 and the FAST Act)and the origins of the Federal Permitting Council. Fred also helps clients obtain federal permit approvals across the full spectrum of environmental and natural resources programs folded into NEPA reviews, including Clean Water Act Section 404/401 permits, cultural and historic resources analyses, Section 7 ESA consultations and approvals, Coast Guard navigability reviews, and petitions before the Surface Transportation Board. Fred serves on the Board of Advisors to the Eno Center for Transportation and as Chair of the Policy and Organization Group for the Transportation Research Board. He is a frequent speaker and lecturer on a wide variety of environmental law and policy issues.

Ted Boling
Partner
Perkins Coie

Ted Boling served as the country’s top National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) attorney as an associate director at the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) in the Executive Office of the President. He also served at CEQ, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI), and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in Democratic and Republican administrations. Ted currently advises leaders on transportation and energy development projects, agencies that must hire outside counsel, and the environmental professionals that support them on the development of renewable energy, resource development, transportation, and infrastructure. He has drafted NEPA guidance on mitigation and monitoring, cumulative impacts analysis, and the development categorical exclusions from detailed NEPA documentation. He advised the White House on the establishment of numerous national monuments, including the first marine national monuments in the United States and the largest marine protected areas in the world. He also assisted in briefing three U.S. Supreme Court cases. Ted has handled matters involving energy development on the outer continental shelf, including offshore wind power development, and the fast track for solar and wind energy projects on public lands.

Tuoya Saren
Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) Candidate
Emory University School of Law 

Tuoya Saren is a Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) Candidate at Emory University School of Law whose research centers on the intersection of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and artificial intelligence in environmental decision-making. Her work examines how AI-enabled tools are being introduced into environmental review and permitting processes, and the resulting legal and policy challenges for administrative governance, transparency, public participation, and judicial review.

Her scholarship focuses in particular on the procedural implications of AI-assisted Environmental Impact Statements under NEPA’s “hard look” doctrine, the regulatory limits of existing federal institutions, and emerging policy pathways for governing AI in environmental assessment. Tuoya’s research has been published in Environmental Law Reporter and the Journal of Environmental Law and Litigation. She previously practiced as an energy and environmental lawyer, advising on large-scale renewable energy and infrastructure projects. She holds an LL.M. from Temple University Beasley School of Law and is admitted to practice law in China.