Veronica Hinman, Dr. Frederick A. Schwertz Distinguished Professor of Life Sciences, Professor and Head, Department of Biological Sciences at Carnegie Mellon will be speaking as part of the Bill Brown Distinguished Lecture in Biological Sciences. Distinguished lectures in biological sciences are named in honor of Bill Brown, head of the Department of Biological Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University from 1995 to 2000. Brown was a visiting professor of biological sciences at Carnegie Mellon Qatar in 2007.

About the lecture

Regrowing Your Head: Regeneration in the Sea Star

Regeneration is a fascinating process by which animals are able to reform lost tissues following traumatic injury. Some animals, including sea stars, are super-regenerators and are able to undergo whole-body regeneration following bisection into two halves. This process involves many poorly understood phenomena including how the remaining cells sense the tissue loss, and how they reprogram to form the missing tissues and organ systems. I will present our recent work seeking to understand how sea star larvae are able to regenerate their anterior body, including their nervous system following bisection. I will show how evolutionarily conserved wounding processes establish the reprogramming of cell lineages, re-establish anterior-posterior patterning and then recapitulate embryogenesis. I present these findings within an evolutionary framework of these processes in other animals to highlight similarities and differences in this process.