The biggest influence on my scientific career was my PhD advisor, Bob Weinberg. He was a wonderful mentor and advisor. He's an outstanding scientist. I just went last November to his 80th birthday party. He still has a research laboratory with postdocs in it. And this was the period in which in the Weinberg lab the very first human oncogenes were being discovered, the very first genes that were mutated in human cancers and then tumor suppressor genes at the same time. It was an incredibly exciting time where molecular biology was being applied to these questions in fundamental biomedicine for the first time. And on the one hand it was really exciting. On the other hand, it was really challenging and difficult and competitive. And yet, throughout that whole process, the main thing I remember getting from Bob was a sense of excitement and scholarship. How are we going to understand this?

What were the big questions? What had we really learned here? And he was a terrific scientist and example, both for the way that he interacted with the people in his lab and encouraged them to do their greatest work and for the way that he ran his own life. He was someone who was deeply committed to his own family. He would always take off most of the summer and go to New Hampshire with his wife and children. And so, he was an example of how to be a human being as well as how to be a scientist.

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.