I was in the fortunate position of being offered a job at UCSF, and I moved there in 1991 for a couple of reasons. The first was I had been at MIT for my whole career. I'd been there for 10 years. Well, yeah, my scientific career at that point. And in that time, MIT did not really have a lot of neuroscience. There were a handful of people, but it was not an active area there. And I was really interested in being in a place where there were more neuroscientists where I could really learn from them more about that field and what the important questions were. And UCSF had a tremendous neuroscience program, really, and viewed itself as a neuroscience program that really was one discipline. So, everything from Lily Jan working on ion channels, to me working on worms, to Marc Tessier-Lavigne's lab working on development, to Stephen Hauser's lab doing neurology or psychiatry, was all part of one continuum and we're all part of the same program.

It was also a very interactive place. And it was such a great place to learn that, to sort of create these relationships and kind of an understanding of the field. So that was one reason. The second reason was that it was really known as an institution for being intensely interactive. And I just think the great joy of science is the joy of interacting with other scientists, hearing their greatest new idea, hearing their most exciting new results or however that is. And so that sense of being part of a community was really, really attractive to me. And finally, it was a place where the junior faculty tended to do really well. It was a place that was extremely supportive of young faculty. And then, I should add one more thing. I was drawn to UCSF in part because even though the numbers were not so great then, about 20% of the faculty were women and they were real leaders and everyone looked up to them.

So Christine Guthrie, who had done tremendous work on RNA splicing was there. Lily Jan, who was just, when I got there, identifying the first ion channels molecularly. Gail Martin, who was the head of the developmental biology program. And these were people who even if the numbers weren't that great, you could tell that nobody ever sort of looked through them. They were really powerful figures. Liz Blackburn, working on telomeres. Or, just a couple of years older than me, Cynthia Kenyon, my colleague. And so, I felt that there was kind of a path forward. There were people that I could see myself as when I saw them. I arrived at UCSF in 1991 and I stayed there until 2004 [when I went to Rockefeller University].

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.