The starting point for any young person who wants to be in science is that science has rewards that no other field has. That joy of discovery, of seeing something for the first time, of solving a problem, is unique and exciting and intensely rewarding and if you feel that you'll want to do it. Now, science is also often difficult, frustrating, full of experiments that don't work and papers that don't get accepted, and all kinds of setbacks that you ultimately have to be able to accept as you move toward a path, and how you balance those things and how you balance those against the other things that you might want to do in your life is a decision that you have to make for yourself. You have to decide what your own priorities are. You have to decide what's best for you of the options that are open. And then you should try because you do your best. You can't do any better than that.

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.