The rockefeller university

Cori Bargmann, head of the Lulu and Anthony Wang Laboratory of Neural Circuits and Behavior at Rockefeller University, will receive the twelfth annual Dart/NYU Biotechnology Achievement Award in Basic Biotechnology. Bargmann, the Torsten N. Wiesel Professor at Rockefeller and an investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, is being recognized for her work in deciphering the neural networks that define individual and group behaviors.

Bargmann studies how C. elegans’s neural circuits develop, identifies the genes and neural pathways for its actions and investigates how sensory inputs regulate those circuits. She has recently found that variation in social behaviors of C. elegans arise from genetic variation in a neuropeptide receptor that modulates a specialized social circuit to integrate environmental and genetic variation to make a single behavioral decision.

After receiving her Ph.D. in 1987 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bargmann pursued a postdoctoral fellowship with H. Robert Horvitz (also at MIT) until 1991, when she accepted a faculty position at the University of California, San Francisco. She remained there until 2004 when she joined Rockefeller. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received the 2009 Richard Lounsbery Award from the US and French National Academies of Sciences, the 2004 Dargut and Milena Kemali International Prize for Research in the Field of Basic and Clinical Neurosciences and the Charles Judson Herrick Award for comparative neurology in 2000.

The Dart/NYU Biotechnology Achievement Award, presented by the Biotechnology Study Center of NYU School of Medicine, recognizes the role of pure science in the development of pharmaceuticals and honors those scientists whose work has led to major advances to improving care provided at the patient’s bedside. The Dart/NYU School of Medicine also presents awards for applied biotechnology and NYU faculty or alumni in biotechnology. A number of Rockefeller researchers have been honored with these awards, including Emil C. Gotschlich and Arnold J. Levine in 2008, Barry Coller in 2003 and Paul Greengard and Leslie Vosshall in 2010.

The awards will be presented at a ceremony on April 9 at the NYU School of Medicine in New York City.