It was really an opportunity to take a few things about science that felt that they were stuck or that they could be different, and sort of try them out and de-risk them for others. And I had been spending time at the NIH, I was involved in planning the BRAIN Initiative, which was clearly in partnership with others at the NIH and with other scientists. But from that experience, I really had a good sense that there were things that the NIH could do and that it couldn't do, and that the existing organizations had some areas of expertise and other areas where there were gaps in their ability to think about how to solve certain problems. I felt ready to see if there was a way of addressing some of those gaps. And some of them were pretty straightforward. I've always been really interested in the ways that new technologies move fields forward.

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.