When I finished working in the Weinberg lab, I had had a great experience there, but as a postdoc, you move into something you're going to be doing for a long time. And the cancer field was full of extremely smart people who were doing a great job. And I wasn't so sure that I would be- that one more person with my particular set of sensibilities and interests was going to add that much to it. And it was more exciting for me to think about moving into a field where there were very few people trying to work on it and moving it forward. And I had always been interested in neuroscience and in the neurobiology of behavior. My mother, when I was little, read to me from the works of the neuroethologists from Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, and so I kind of knew these stories about animals and instinctive behaviors and it always seemed really fascinating to me.

And of course, this work, which was done in the early 20th century, they had no framework in which to describe that. We didn't know anything about genes or very much about brains at that point, but clearly there had to be some sort of genetic mechanism for innate behaviors that were shared by all individuals in a species. And I was just very curious about what that would be. How would you, having now learned through molecular biology, how molecular biology itself worked to be able to address cell biological questions like transcription or cancer, now it seemed that maybe you could start to use those tools to study questions like the brain and behavior. And I found that a very compelling direction to go in. And it was very wide open at that time.

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.