Caressa Tsai is an associate in Morrison Foerster’s San Francisco office and a member of the firm’s Patent Strategy + Prosecution Group.

Caressa’s practice focuses on life sciences and biotechnology patent drafting and prosecution.

Before joining Morrison Foerster as an associate, Caressa was a summer associate and law clerk at the firm in the Two-Summer Patent Program.

Caressa received her J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she was a publishing editor of the California Law Review and a senior life sciences editor for the Berkeley Technology Law Journal. She received Jurisprudence Awards for Life Sciences and Innovation Workshops I and II, the Prosser Prize for Intellectual Property Law, and the Law and Technology Certificate.

Prior to law school, Caressa received her Ph.D. in biochemistry and biomedical sciences from McMaster University. Her Ph.D. research focused on exploiting host immune pathways for anti-infective drug discovery in Salmonella. She graduated with an H.B.Sc. with high distinction in biology from the University of Toronto, where her research focused on bioinformatic approaches to detect signatures of selection in intrinsically disordered proteins. Caressa has experience in research and matters relating to bacterial genomics, molecular biology, protein biochemistry, infectious diseases, immunology, and computational biology.