I think we're all responsible for charting our own path and doing what's best for us among the options that we have open to us. I would not consider my own particular decisions about my personal life or my career to be necessarily right for anyone other than myself. But I did what I wanted to do and I did my best. And you can't do any better than that, really. And I would say that I have advised other women, and sometimes men, who felt some amount of conflict about their different priorities and which of those should take precedence at different times. And what I think is I didn't feel that I was in a position where I had to make those choices. I didn't feel that my decisions were hard to make particularly. But for those that did, I think they found it reassuring to hear that it was their own decision and they should do what they thought was the most important thing to do. And also, that they should not be afraid to do what they really wanted to do. I think sometimes people talk themselves out of what they really want to do because they think it's going to be too difficult, and then somehow it works. Life is long and you can't do everything at the same time, but it turns out that you actually have time to do many more things than you think you do when you're just getting started. So, I've seen many people take many paths to success in science or starting in science and then being successful in other areas, which is also fine.

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.