I want to say something about women in science and about gender equity in academia in particular, and that is that I have tremendous appreciation for the women who opened the doors that I was able to go through. That until the mid-1970s really, it was so hard for women to get into graduate school or to be admitted to a good job or to get a faculty position or to be treated seriously if they had one. And when I look at the women from that generation, I'm just so grateful for the fact that they opened the doors that I was able to go through. I was just at Eve Marder's 75th birthday party and she has been an example, and also, she's kind of like a tough drill sergeant for so many women in neuroscience. She's always pushing us to do better.

And Carla Shatz's 75th birthday is coming up toward the end of the summer, and it's the same thing. These are the people who made it possible for other women to succeed. There were so many women who were at Eve's birthday party who, like me, had not trained with her, but who had been in her extended family of people that she was helping along and advising and collaborating with in that work. And I think that that has been a really positive thing. And I really want to say that I know this project is being done in part with Nancy Hopkins, and so she's another person. She opened some of the doors that people went through. She was able to use facts to make people realize that no, things were not fair at the time. They were just not fair. And she created the evidence that allowed that to change.

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.