A new model system for studying the evolution of regeneration and development

Mansi Srivastava received her A.B. in Biological Sciences from Mount Holyoke College and her Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California at Berkeley. For her graduate research, she studied comparative genomics of early-diverging animal lineages including cnidarians, placozoans, and sponges. In 2009, she began her postdoctoral research on the evolution of regenerative mechanisms at the Whitehead Institute/MIT, where she developed a new acoelomorph model system to study regeneration from an evolutionary perspective. Mansi was appointed as Assistant Professor in 2015 in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, where she teaches undergraduates and graduate students and runs her research program. The Srivastava lab focuses both on identifying the mechanisms of regeneration and development and on understanding how these processes have evolved over the course of animal evolution.