I spent six years as the Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. It was something that involved starting something from nothing. When I moved to CZI, I was sitting at a white plastic table upstairs from the Hoot & Toot dry cleaners in Menlo Park. There were no other scientists. There were a couple of people working on education. And I could think about what I thought was important in science, and as long as I could persuade two people, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, that it was a good idea, I could try to move those forward. And that's a unique opportunity. And I don't think that I would have gone out and looked for a position like that, but once it became clear that this was something that they wanted to do, that they wanted to support science, and that it was an opportunity that I would have and that we shared certain kinds of sensibilities about what it would take to move science forward and what kinds of directions they wanted to go in, that I felt that I could be a good companion to them.

It was an opportunity to have a bigger impact on the things that I care about than I would have through my own lab. And it was clear that that was going to come at some cost to the productivity of my own lab and to the attention that my students and postdocs were going to get for that period of time. But the opportunity to support science in a different way carried weight for me. And I feel that for any of these things, there's a set of questions you ask yourself about what the job is. It's like, first of all, is this worth doing it all? Second, would I enjoy it? Third, would I do a good job of it? And fourth, will it come out differently if I do it than if someone else does it? And in this case, to the best of my ability to tell, I thought that the answer to all four of those questions was yes.

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.