I went to public schools in Athens. It was a college town, so many of the people there were also faculty brats like me. It was during the civil rights era and the schools weren't integrated until I was in the sixth grade, so I remember that actually quite vividly and sort of the cultural upheavals that happened during that period. And I continued in public school until I went to college. In high school I started to just become attached to science. I really liked the chemistry lab and I would hide there when I was supposed to be going to the pep rallies. And then when I was 17 years old, I got a summer job at the university making fly food for a population genetics lab, Wyatt Anderson's lab. And my job was the most menial thing imaginable, just mixing cornmeal and autoclaving it and putting it in these vials, but I loved the lab setting. I loved listening to people talk and think about big ideas and at some level I just got hooked there and never left.

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.