How could we go about learning about the worms, how behaviors were organized, what kinds of genes and mechanisms were important? And that was what I did in Bob Horvitz's lab. And Bob Horvitz was- he believed two things. One was you could study anything in C. elegans and the second was that you could study anything using genetics. He was very Catholic in his approach to these scientific questions. And even though the lab was not primarily a neuroscience lab, he was open to the idea that of course you could study neuroscience and C. elegans, of course you could study behavior. So, what was going on in the lab when I was there were two projects. One of them was a developmental biology project on development of the egg-laying structures of the hermaphrodite worm. And, in a kind of hilarious coincidence, the genes that emerged from that, which I did not work on, turned out to be a tyrosine kinase receptor related to the EGF receptor, which is of course what my main graduate project was about, a tyrosine kinase receptor related to the EGF receptor, and a signaling pathway downstream of that receptor, which involved the RAS gene, which was of course the other major oncogene studied in the Weinberg lab.

So, I barely escaped, that's all I have to say, by not taking that project. And then the second project and big project in the Horvitz lab at the time was studying programmed cell death. And it was the first identification of the programmed cell death pathway and what are now called the caspases and that regulatory mechanism. So again, once you could bring genetics to a problem, all of a sudden, the pieces would lie in front of you and you could start to assemble the mechanisms that were being used in biology. But I didn't do much genetics when I was there. I just tried to figure out what the worm could do, what was the worm's behavior, how did it interact with its environment? And then, building the map of how the nervous system and the behaviors interlocked with each other to generate.

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.