When I was applying to graduate schools, there were a number of places that I considered going. And the reason that I went to MIT is that they had a very strong commitment to educating the graduate students who came in, not just putting them to work in a lab. And so, it was a great place to go if you were changing fields or you were trying to do something new. The coursework was very rigorous. All of the students took it and they felt they would bring everyone up to the same level of intellectual mastery before they would start in a research lab. And that was the right place for me at that time. I love being at Rockefeller now, but Rockefeller has a much more laissez-faire attitude toward education. They say here, you should learn science by doing science and not necessarily in the classroom and I was not ready for that at that point. And I was much more ready to go through the MIT classroom experience and be exposed to many other areas that I wouldn't have known about otherwise, including taking Bob Weinberg's cancer biology class and then moving from there to the next part, my own research.

Cori Bargmann is an American neurobiologist and geneticist whose research focuses on C. elegans genetics and the neural pathways controlling behavior, including pathogen response and odor recognition. Bargmann is the Torsten N. Wiesel Professor and Vice President for Academic Affairs at The Rockefeller University.

Bargmann received her Ph.D. from MIT in 1987, where she studied the neu/HER2 oncogene with Bob Weinberg. Her work on the neurobiology and genetics of behavior began during a postdoctoral fellowship with Bob Horvitz at MIT. She was a faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco from 1991 to 2004, and has been the Torsten N. Wiesel Professor at Rockefeller University since 2004. Her work has addressed the relationships between genes, circuits, and behaviors in C. elegans, including the basis of odor recognition and odor preference, the circuits and neuromodulatory systems that regulate innate behaviors, the genetics of natural behavioral variation, and behavioral responses to pathogens.

Bargmann is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. In 2012, she received the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience and in 2013, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. In 2013-2014, she and Bill Newsome co-chaired the advisory group to the NIH Director for President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative. In 2016, she became the first Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a position she held until 2022.