Mansi Srivastava is Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, USA, where her group has developed the three-banded panther worm (Hofstenia miamia) as a model system in which to study whole-body regeneration. This year, Mansi is a Guest Editor for Development's special issue on lifelong development, which highlights how developmental processes and pathways are used throughout animal lifespans. We last interviewed Mansi in 2022, so we caught up with her over Zoom to discuss the importance of studying development across the lifetime of an organism, how this relates to her own research, and why Hofstenia is the perfect model for studying the extent to which regeneration involves the recapitulation of developmental processes.