Rate My Professor Tessa Montague

Tessa Montague is a neuroscientist and HHMI Hanna Gray Fellow at Columbia University. She holds a B.A. and M.Phil. in genetics from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Harvard University. As a Ph.D. student in Alex Schier’s lab at Harvard, she investigated molecular pathways in zebrafish embryogenesis and co-developed the CHOPCHOP CRISPR/Cas9 web tool. During her doctoral studies, she participated in the Embryology Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in 2017, which sparked her interest in cephalopods. She returned to the Marine Biological Laboratory as a Grass Fellow in 2018 to begin research on cuttlefish camouflage.

As a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Richard Axel at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute, Montague studies the neural basis of cuttlefish camouflage behavior, focusing on how visual information is represented in neural activity and transformed into matching skin patterns. In 2023, she was first author on the paper “A brain atlas of the camouflaging dwarf cuttlefish, Sepia bandensis,” published in Current Biology. Her work explores specialized behaviors in cephalopods to advance understanding of brain function. Montague serves as Education Director for BLAST – Bio Labs for African Students and Teachers, conducting biology workshops in Ghana.