NEUROBIOLOGIST, ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY, AND CO-CHAIR, BRAIN INITIATIVE PRESIDENT, CHAN ZUKERBERG SCIENCE
Dr Cornelia ‘Cori’ Bargmann, is the neuroscientist who leads the Laboratory of Neural Circuits and Behavior at Rockefeller University, New York, where she is a Torsten N Wiesel Professor and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She studied biochemistry at the University of Georgia and went on to do a PhD in cancer biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she worked with cancer researcher Robert Weinberg. Bargmann’s thesis research went on to contribute to the development of the drug Herceptin which is used in the treatment of breast cancer.
As a post-doctoral researcher, she began to use the roundworm as a model system and went on to make discoveries which explain how genes, the environment and experience shape behaviour. In 2013 she was made co-chair of the advisory committee for Barack Obama’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, which investigates brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, depression and traumatic brain injury.