Veronica Hinman spoke to an audience of students, faculty, staff and alumni at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q), a Qatar Foundation partner university, about the process of regeneration in the sea star.

Hinman is a developmental biologist at Carnegie Mellon’s main campus, where she is the Dr. Frederick A. Schwertz Distinguished Professor of Life Sciences, and the head of the Department of Biological Sciences. 

Hinman studies the process of regeneration after a sea star undergoes traumatic injury. Sea stars are considered super-regenerators, able to undergo whole-body regeneration if they are cut in half. During her talk, Hinman outlined many of the questions that the process of regeneration raises, such as how the remaining cells detect that part of the organism was removed, how the cells reprogram to form missing tissues.

The presentation was a CMU-Q Bill Brown Distinguished Lecture in Biological Sciences, a lecture series named in honor of Bill Brown, head of the Department of Biological Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University from 1995 to 2000. Brown was also a visiting professor of biological sciences at Carnegie Mellon Qatar in 2007.