And I think at that stage in your career, you want to see someone who's some sort of an example of what you might be like or what you could imagine yourself to be like later in life. And in some ways, I would like to think that I would be like Bob Weinberg with his erudition and scholarship and commitment to exciting questions. But I think it does make a difference to see someone who maybe looks a little bit more like you. And I remember at the time being really fascinated with the women that I would see who are scientists, even the postdocs who were a little older than me, but especially the faculty members. How did they carry themselves? How did they interact with other people? What were their interests? What were their ways of interacting with the world? I teased Ruth Lehmann about this. She's now the director of the Whitehead Institute, but I remember her when she was a job candidate coming to interview at MIT. I remember what shoes she was wearing when she gave her job interview because I was so hungry to see what someone would look like who was making it at that next level.

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.