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MCO Alum Tessa Montague Chosen as 2019 Hanna Gray Fellow by HHMI!

MCO Alum Tessa Montague Chosen as 2019 Hanna Gray Fellow by HHMI!

MCO graduate program alum Tessa Montague (Ph.D, ‘18) has been selected as a recipient HHMI’s prestigious Hanna Gray Fellowship. The fellowship provides up to 1.4 million dollars in funding and up to 8 years support for exceptional early career scientists who hail from groups underrepresented in science faculty. Montague is one of just 15 early career scholars in the fellowship’s 2019 class.

Montague, who completed her Ph.D. in the Schier Lab, is currently a postdoc in Richard Axel’s lab at Columbia. During her time at Harvard, Montague studied early developmental mechanisms in zebrafish embryos and developed a CRISPR/Cas9 bioinformatics tool called CHOPCHOP and went on to spend a summer as a  Grass Fellow at Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, where she studied cuttlefish camouflage. At Columbia, she is continuing her cuttlefish work in order to understand how neurons represent visual information.

Congratulations to Tessa and all of the 2019 Hanna Gray Fellows!

Tessa Montague

Tessa Montague