Sara Montagnese is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Honorary Consultant Physician at Padova University Hospital, in Italy, and a Full Professor of Chronobiology at the University of Surrey, in the UK. 

She has a longstanding clinical and research interest in hepatic encephalopathy, a cerebral complication of liver disease on which she has published extensively, especially in relation to diagnosis and differential diagnosis. She is Past President of the International Society for Hepatic Encephalopathy and Nitrogen Metabolism (ISHEN) and a member of the Governing Boards of the Italian Association for the Study of the Liver (AISF) and the European Biological Rhythms Society (EBRS). She is Associate Editor and Special Section Editor (Snapshots) of Journal of Hepatology, and Associate Editor of Frontiers in Physiology – Chronobiology. She has also been part of the Editorial Boards of Hepatology and BMJ-Open Gastroenterology. 

She also has a research interest in the sleep-wake disturbances exhibited by patients with cirrhosis and she has made significant contributions to their understanding and their treatment. She is currently using her experience in the liver field as a model and applying it to several other areas of medicine. In addition, she is working on the management of hospitalisation-related sleep-wake and circadian abnormalities, and on the definition of patient-specific tools for circadian assessment.
Her research has been funded by the European Association for the Study of the Liver, the University of Padova, the CaRiPaRo foundation, the Italian Ministry of Health, and the EU- H2020.