So what I did in Horvitz's lab was that I sort of characterized behaviors. I identified the neurons required for those behaviors by using cell ablation techniques and testing the behaviors. I accidentally along the way discovered that a handful of those neurons also control the animal's development and its decision about whether it's going to grow up to be an adult or arrest in something called a dauer larva stage. That was an annoying artifact in one of my experiments that I took some time to realize was actually interesting. And then that created the structure with which to think about how to identify mutants and genes that had interesting properties. So, for example, once it was clear that a particular neuron detected the following five odors, then it was also clear that if you could identify a mutant animal that could detect four of those five odors, that could not be because the neuron was not there. That must mean something more selective about the question of recognition and specificity. And that was one of the screens that my new lab at UCSF started doing was to use that information to target our attention towards specific questions like, well, how do they actually recognize these odors?

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.