Overview

Gender

female

Cornelia Bargmann is the Torsten N. Wiesel Professor and head of the Lulu and Anthony Wang Laboratory of Neural Circuits and Behavior at The Rockefeller University, New York.

She has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 1995. She is a neurobiologist who studies the relationships between genes, neural circuits and behaviour using C. elegans, a tiny roundworm, as the model for her work.

Many of the genes and neural pathways in C. elegans are similar to those of mammals and their study provides an insight into the development and functioning of neural circuits. Cori holds a degree in biochemistry from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied oncogenes with Robert Weinberg.

She pursued a postdoctoral fellowship with H. Robert Horvitz at MIT until 1991, when she accepted a faculty position in the Department of Anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco, spending 13 years there, latterly as Vice-Chair of the department.

She took up her current position at The Rockefeller University in 2004. Cori was the recipient of the 2015 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science, one of nine individuals presented with awards by The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia in 2015.

The award is for her contributions to neurobiology that have led to major discoveries elucidating the relationship between genes, neurons, neural circuits and behaviour.