Dr. Pongsiri is the Lead Advisor on Climate Change and Health at Save the Children’s U.S. Office in Washington, D.C. She was the first Science Advisor at the U.S. Mission to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Jakarta, Indonesia where she led the Mission’s efforts to work with Member States to apply science and technology to support ASEAN’s sustainability goals and to strengthen the capacity of science-based policy-making through programs such as the ASEAN-US sustainable cities partnership and the ASEAN-US Science and Technology Fellows Program.

She was an Environmental Health Scientist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Research and Development where she developed and led a research initiative on biodiversity and human health which studied the links between anthropogenic stressors, changes in biodiversity, and infectious disease transmission. Montira 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 and the Rockefeller-Boston University High-level Commission on Health Determinants, Data, and Decision-making, she brought expertise on environmental change-human disease linkages. 

Since serving in government, Montira was a Visiting Scientist at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Asia and the Pacific Regional Office and worked at Cornell University and the University of Oxford on planetary health science policy. She serves on the Steering Committee of the Future Earth Health Knowledge Action Network.

Montira’s primary research and science policy interests are in applying scientific understanding of the relationship between the condition of natural systems and human health for long-term sustainability impact. She has a PhD and MPH from Yale University.