Tessa Hill

Tessa Hill

Tessa M. Hill is a Professor and Chancellor’s Fellow at University of California, Davis, in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences. She has served as the Associate Director for Academic Programs for the UC Davis Coastal & Marine Sciences Institute since 2014. Hill is a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences and was named a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists & Engineers (PECASE) in 2016. Hill was awarded an AAAS Leshner Leadership Institute Public Engagement Fellowship in the inaugural year of this award (2016).

After graduating with a B.S. in Marine Science from Eckerd College in 1999, Hill completed a Ph.D. in Marine Science from UC Santa Barbara in 2004. She was then awarded a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship (2004-2006) and began as an Assistant Professor at UC Davis in 2006. Research in the Hill laboratory is focused on climate change, both past and present, and understanding the response of marine species to environmental perturbation.

Hill leads a program with pre-service K-12 STEM teachers to infuse their classrooms with climate change science, in collaboration with the UC Davis Math & Science Teaching (MAST) program and supported by the National Science Foundation. She is the lead investigator on an industry-academic partnership that aims to understand the consequences of global change and ocean acidification on sustainable seafood. Hill’s work has been featured in a variety of mass media outlets (e.g., NPR, The New York Times, Al Jazeera America, Science Friday). From 2014-2016, Hill served as a panelist on the West Coast Ocean Acidification and Hypoxia Panel, and currently serves on the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary Advisory Board.

Hill joined the Society’s Board of Trustees in 2016.