I love doing science. I love thinking about science. I think that one of the privileges we have in science is that we are allowed to govern ourselves and we don't even really think about how untrue that is in other settings or outside of academia. We get to review the grants. We get to decide what gets funded. We get to review the papers and decide what's really important to the field. And in the same way, at some point in your career, we get to be the department chairs and the institutional leaders. And at some point in your career, if you want that to continue to be true, you should probably take on some of that responsibility to keep the field going. And again, one of the nice things about the field is yes, there's an expectation that most people will give some of their time to the community, to service, but you have a lot of choices about what that will be and you can kind of guide your interactions with the community in the directions that you feel are important and that you want to see move forward.

So for me, I love knowing about science. I love hearing about science. I love thinking about what the next steps are. It was very natural for me to be involved in planning science for the future, either together with people from the NIH or subsequently with philanthropy with Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. I did not feel called to be a department chair or university president. Those are very different kinds of jobs with very different responsibilities and skills that are required. I felt that in all of the positions that I took, all I had to really do was to think very carefully about what science needed to move forward and help to move things in those directions.

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.