Montira Pongsiri, PhD, MPH
Climate Change and Health Advisor, Save the Children
Dr. Montira Pongsiri is the Climate Change and Health Advisor at Save the Children. She was the first Science Advisor at the U.S. Mission to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) where she led the Mission’s efforts to apply science and technology to support ASEAN’s sustainability goals and to strengthen the capacity of science-based policy-making.
She was an Environmental Health Scientist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Research and Development where she led a research initiative on biodiversity and human health which studied the links between anthropogenic stressors, changes in biodiversity, and infectious disease transmission. She was the agency’s lead on technical partnerships with the Smithsonian Institution and with Rockefeller’s 100 Resilient Cities Global Challenge. As a member of The Rockefeller Foundation-Lancet Commission on Planetary Health, Dr. Pongsiri brought expertise on environmental change-human disease linkages.
At Cornell University and the University of Oxford, Dr. Pongsiri worked to apply planetary health science to policy for sustainability impact. She has been a Consultant on global environmental change and health including with multilateral organizations in the Asia Pacific Region. Dr. Pongsiri is an Affiliated Researcher on health at the Stockholm Environment Institute, Asia Centre in Bangkok, Thailand.