Dr Zaty Aktar Mokhtar is a Principal Assistant Director at the Research and Technical Development Division of the Malaysian Meteorological Department (MET Malaysia). She has over 20 years of professional experience across operational meteorology, including weather forecasting and aviation meteorology, disaster risk management, climate research and earthquake- and tsunami-related early warning systems and risk assessment.
She holds a Bachelor of Science (Hons.) in Physics from the National University of Malaysia. In 2007, she completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Tsunami Disaster Mitigation at the International Institute of Seismology and Earthquake Engineering (IISEE), Tsukuba, Japan, followed by a Master’s degree in Disaster Mitigation jointly awarded by the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) Tokyo and the Building Research Institute (BRI), Japan. She subsequently obtained a Doctoral Degree in Water Resource Engineering from Universiti Putra Malaysia in 2019.
Her work focuses on strengthening hazard monitoring and early warning systems and translating scientific research into actionable information for decision-making. Her current research addresses climate change adaptation, with a particular emphasis on the impacts of extreme weather events and heat-related health outcomes on communities.