Tessa Montague, Ph.D.
Tessa received a B.A. and M.Phil. in Genetics from the University of Cambridge, where she worked in the lab of Daniel St Johnston. As a Ph.D. student at Harvard University, Tessa dissected molecular pathways underlying zebrafish embryogenesis in Alex Schier’s lab and co-created the CRISPR/Cas9 web tool, CHOPCHOP. In the final year of her Ph.D., Tessa attended the 2017 Embryology Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, where she became fascinated by cephalopods (cuttlefish, octopuses and squid). This inspired her to return to Woods Hole a year later as a Grass Fellow to begin work on cuttlefish camouflage. As a postdoc in the Axel lab, Tessa is now trying to uncover the neural basis of cuttlefish camouflage behavior to understand how visual information is internally represented in the brain.
Tessa is an HHMI Hanna Gray Fellow.