Dr Tessa Lord is a reproductive biologist specialising in spermatogenesis and spermatogonial stem cell biology.

Tessa established her research at University of Newcastle in 2019, after postdoctoral training at Washington State University (2016-18) with Professor Jon Oatley (world-leading researcher in spermatogonial stem cell biology) and a PhD (2012-2015) with world-leader in sperm biology, L/Professor John Aitken.

Tessa is now an emerging leader in her own right, with >1500 citations, h-index of 18, and FWCI of 1.86 for outputs related to Testis/Seminiferous tubules. Tessa has published in high-impact journals including Science (2020, first-author invited perspectives piece), Developmental Cell (2020, corresponding author meta-analysis/review) and iScience (2023, senior-author research article).

She has participated in 5 invited international speaker engagements in 2022-24 alone, including the American Society for Andrology and Gordon Conference for Germinal Stem Cell Biology.

Tessa has been awarded >$2M in funding since 2019, including as CIA on an NHMRC grant which characterised the role of hypoxia-inducible factors in spermatogonial stem cell regeneration (2020), and an ARC DECRA Fellowship that is exploring the intersection between hypoxia signalling and metabolism for the development of spermatogonial stem cell technologies (2022).