It's hard to go back in time and remember how different things were for women at that time. So, the civil rights era was in the 1960s. The sort of women's rights really were only in the 1970s. It was only in the late 1970s that it became illegal to discriminate against someone for a job purely on the basis of sex. It was only, I think in 1982 that Columbia University first allowed girls to attend as undergraduates. These things were happening in real time. And while on the one hand at the University of Georgia, there were many young women and young men who were in college there, I think there were already about half and half women and men attending college, in areas like the sciences and also in the faculty things were very skewed. So, in retrospect, I didn't even notice it at the time, but I never had a professor who was a woman when I was in college. Not even in my humanities classes, let alone in science or math. And so, it was a time in which on the one hand doors were open to me that had been closed to earlier generations of women, and on the other hand I could not see anyone who had made it through those doors through to their careers.

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.