Sari Kovats is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Health, Environments and Society in the Faculty of Public Health and Policy. She has been researching the effects of weather, climate and climate change on human health for more than 20 years. 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 is the Consortium co-lead for the Belmont funded project CHAMNHA - Climate, Heat and Maternal and Neonatal Health in Africa. This project is undertaking epidemiological research on the impact extreme hot weather on maternal and neonatal outcomes. 

Sari is the Knowledge Mobilisation lead for the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit (NIHR HPRU) in Environmental Change and Health, led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in partnership with Public Health England (PHE) and UCL. Sari is exploring the equity implications of the impacts of and responses to heatwave and flooding on health in the UK population. 

Sari was the co-Coordinating Lead Author for Chapter 23 on Europe in the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] Fifth Assessment Report (2014). Sari is co-author of the chapter on "Health, Communities and the Built Environment" for the evidence review of the UK Third Climate Change Risk Assessment (2021).

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 environmental epidemiology in 2010 at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.