Hegy is a leadership and performance coach. She holds a PhD from the University of Heidelberg and the German Cancer Research Centre in molecular biosciences.

Hegy made a remarkable discovery which was published in the journal Nature. Stem cells play an important role in animals, for the good and for the bad. On the ‘good’ side, they continuously repair epithelial tissues that are exposed to damage such as our skin and gut, and they replenish short-lived cells such as our blood. On the ‘bad’ side, since stem cells are proliferative, they can give rise to cancer. Hence the precise regulation of stem cell proliferation is crucial for health and disease. Sara discovered in Drosophila that the proliferation of stem cells of the intestine is regulated by the steroid sex hormone ecdysone, which is homologous to human oestrogen. She found that the elevated levels of this hormone in females after mating promotes intestinal stem cell proliferation, leading to an increased size of the female gut. Evolutionarily, this is important because it maximizes nutrient uptake, allowing high fecundity of female flies. Indeed, flies can lay up to half of their total body weight as eggs per day. However, on the ‘bad’ side, Hegy found that the action of ecdysone on the intestinal stem cells predisposes fertilized female flies to intestinal tumours. This work sheds light on the balance evolution had to strike between maximizing the lifespan and the fecundity of female flies. It also makes the important conceptual advance that the stem cells of non-sex organs such as the gut can be under sex-hormone control.

Hegy's vision is to cause leadership globally by promoting the next-generation of leaders to a state of satisfaction and fulfilment in their relationships and beyond.