Associate Professor Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick

Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick is a Senior Lecturer/ARC Future Fellow in the School of Science, UNSW Canberra, and a chief investigator on the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes.  She received her PhD in 2010 from the Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW Sydney, where she also worked from 2011-2020. Sarah was a post-doc at CSIRO  during 2009-2011 on the Pacific Climate Change Science Program. As a climate scientist specialising in extreme events, Sarah’s expertise focuses on heatwaves and event attribution. She leads pioneering research on how to measure heatwaves and their changes in the observational record. Sarah has analysed how heatwaves will change under various scenarios of global warming, both over Australia and globally. She is also interested in how natural climate variability drives heatwaves, as well as employing detection and attribution methods to understand how climate change influences specific extremes and their impacts. She is especially interested in how climate change is altering the health impacts of extreme heat events. Sarah has co-authored 87 publications throughout her career, most of which focus on extreme heat in a changing climate. She is also passionate about science communication, and regularly comments on all things heatwaves and climate change in both the Australian and international media. Sarah was the recipient of the 2021 Australian Academy of Science Dorothy Hill medal.