The next step is always the thing that I don't know yet. I have been for a while really interested in the way that the nervous system flexibly rewires itself. How a single nervous system, and in the case of a worm a very simple nervous system, can give rise to many different behaviors depending on the context, and then switch back into a different outcome. It's tremendously- it's not just learning or changes in development, it's sort of real time remodeling of a whole set of behavioral states. And to some extent, we understand those as the properties of these neuromodulatory systems, things like peptides and small molecules like serotonin and dopamine. And to another extent, it's a really interesting question in how a system changes its entire self to some degree under molecular rules, and to some degree probably with some gaps in our understanding. So, one of the things that's interesting about that to me is that it's not just a question about the brain because the brain is not the only thing that generates behavior. It's a question about the relationship between an organism's physiology and its behavior because they're always kind of matching their behavior to their physiological needs and just this kind of brain body connection, which is something that many people have become very interested in the past couple of years actually, and how metabolism and physiology and endocrinology and neuroscience intersect is kind of the next level of complexity of sort of hooking together, not just brains, but the rest of an animal's...

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.