She has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and had been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at UCSF and then Rockefeller University from 1995 to 2016.

She examined the molecular mechanisms of oncogenesis, and helped identify the role of Ras in bladder cancer.

[7] Bargmann completed a postdoc with H. Robert Horvitz at MIT, working on molecular biology mechanisms of neuroscience.

She began working on chemosensory behavior in C. elegans, and achieved several breakthroughs, demonstrating, among other things, that nematodes have a sense of smell.

[7][9] The work has continued to lead to a deeper understanding of the brain, sensory abilities, and neuronal development.

Bargmann's lab uses a relatively simple organism, the nematode C. elegans, and its extremely sensitive sense of smell to study how genes regulate neuronal development, function, and behavior.

Previously, she had been married to Michael J. Finney, who also completed graduate studies at MIT and is now a Director at Sage Science, Inc. For a vivid portrait of Bargmann as a young scientist working in Weinberg's lab, see Natalie Angier's book Natural Obsessions: The Search for the Oncogene.