Sari Kovats BA MSc PhD

Senior Lecturer in Environmental Epidemiology

Sari Kovats is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social and Environmental Research in the Faculty of Public Health and Policy. She has been actively researching the effects of weather and climate on human health for more than 15 years and has published widely on this topic; including 60 peer-reviewed journal papers and more than 20 book chapters. Her particular areas of interest include health impact assessment of climate change and epidemiological studies of the effects of climate, weather and weather events in urban and rural populations.

Sari has been employed by LSHTM since 1994 when she joined the Dept of Epidemiology and Population Health to work as a research assistant on one of the first comprehensive books on climate change and health: McMichael AJ, Haines A, Slooff R, and Kovats S, eds. Climate Change and Human Health: an assessment prepared by a Task Group on behalf of the World Health Organization, the World Meteorological Organization, and the United Nations Environment Programme. Geneva, WHO, 1996 [WHO/EHG/96.7].  In 1997, Sari was promoted to Research Fellow and in 2003 to Lecturer, and in 2010 to Senior Lecturer. Sari has a Masters Degree in Social Policy from the SouthBank University in London and completed a part-time PhD in epidemiology in 2010 at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Sari is a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the Global Environmental Change and Human Health Project of ESSP (Earth System Science Partnership) and on the management committee for the WHO Collaborating Centre on Global Change and Health at LSHTM. Since 2010, Sari has been a Fellow of the Collegium Ramazzini. She is also on the editorial board of the journal Global Environmental Change.

Sari has been involved extensively in the scientific assessment of the impacts of climate change on health for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She is currently a co-Coordinating Lead Author for the chapter on Europe in the forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report, due to be published in 2014.

Affiliation

Teaching

Sari teaches postgraduates in the field of environment, health and sustainable development. Sari organises the Module "Environment, Health and Sustainable Development" for the in-house Masters courses at LSHTM. She is also tutor to students on the MSc Public Health and supervises one PhD student. Sari has given lectures on climate and health in various academic institutions and teaches on the Environmental Module for the MPhil Epidemiology at the University of Cambridge.

Research

Sari is currently working on two European Commission-funded projects: CLIMATECOST (on the damage costs and adaptation costs related to the health impacts of climate change in Europe, and India) and INTARESE (Integrated assessment of health risks of environmental stressors in Europe). In 2010, she successfully coordinated a workshop on Health Impacts of Catastrophic Climate Change, funded by the Met Office AVOID programme.

Sari is co-chair of the Global Assessment on the Health Impacts of Climate Change, a multi-country initiative supported by the World Health Organization. She has also recently contributed, with Dr Zaid Chalabi, to a UNEP project on providing guidance on climate policy planning (MCA4climate).

Research areas

  • Climate change
  • Environment
  • Public health
  • Risk

Disciplines

  • Epidemiology
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