Professor Rowell’s research interests revolve around risk regulation, the environment, and human behavior. She has taught courses on environmental law, administrative law, behavioral law and economics, risk and the environment, law and sustainable economic development, and valuation. Her research focuses on integrating scientific and social science insights into risk regulation and on the interactions between law, science, social science, and policy.
Her key interest areas are regulation and risk analysis, environmental law and policy, climate change, cost-benefit analysis, law, and psychology.
Recently, her research has focused on bringing interdisciplinary insights into environmental law. This year she published three books: The Psychology of Environmental Law (with Kenworthey Bilz), which explores the relationship between environmental law and psychology, and two companion volumes – A Guide to U.S. Environmental Law and A Guide to EU Environmental Law (with Josephine van Zeben) – which are designed to make environmental law accessible to non-legal readers and to foreign lawyers. Her past scholarly work has been published in law reviews and interdisciplinary journals including Science, the Harvard Environmental Law Review, and the University of Chicago Law Review. 
Professor Rowell has been a visiting professor at Duke Law School (2018) and Harvard Law School (2015-16) and was a visiting researcher at Oxford University (2015, 2016). In 2015, she also completed a federal detail at the Environmental Protection Agency, and was named a University Scholar through a program at the University of Illinois meant to recognize the university’s “very best teachers and scholars.”
Before joining the Illinois faculty in 2010, Professor Rowell was a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School, from which she also received her J.D. After law school, Professor Rowell practiced at Perkins Coie LLP in Seattle. Professor Rowell has a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology/archaeology, which she earned from the University of Washington at the age of 18. Before law school, she worked as an encyclopedia entry writer and as a video game tester.