Tessa Pierce, M.S.

Tessa Pierce is a second-year PhD student in Marine Biology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She received her BS and MS from Stanford University, where she conducted work ranging from the evolution of neurotoxic venom of Cone snails to the adaptive management of marine reserves based on nearshore monitoring of rockfish abundance. In her first year at Scripps, she started work on the heat stress response of a marine model organism, the copepod Tigriopus californicus.

Tessa is visiting the Frazer lab to work on RNA-Seq analysis, which she hopes to use in investigating marine organism response to climate change stressors such as increasing temperatures and ocean acidification. She is currently supported by a San Diego Fellowship and Duff Family fellowship as part of the Scripps NSF IGERT: Global Change, Marine Ecosystems, and Society program.