Jill Bargonetti

Biography

Born on October 10, 1962 in New York Hospital, Jill Bargonetti is the daughter of Adah Askew and Arthur Bargonetti. Her mother and father are African-American and Italian respectively and they met in a club in Harlem where her father played the trumped in a band while her mother danced. Growing up in an interracial home as well as a multiracial community with whites, Asians, Hasidic Jews in the Upper West Side of Manhattan fostered diversity. Ultimately, this was a valuable experience and she believes it helped her to learn much. It is in this community that Bargonetti accredits that she discovered her passion for dancing. Her mother was her main source of inspiration for the arts as Askew studied dance at Hunter College under a leading anthropological African dancer by the name Pearl Primus. The close bond between Askew and Bargonetti is shown in the book Mothers and Daughters published in 1995 while also highlighting other mother-daughter pairs through essays, poetry and photographs.

Throughout her elementary education at Hunter College Elementary School and even high school education at the Bronx High School of Science, she danced and aspired to become a professional dancer. She completed her undergraduate education at State University of New York at Purchase College from where she received her bachelors in biology. Having still been passionate about dance, she commuted from Harlem to classes in order to be able to perform in Sounds of Motion, a dance company found by Dianne McIntyre. One of her biggest roles was dancing in a theater piece called “Takeoff From a Forced Landing” which strived to tell the story of support and independence. Bargonetti’s role in this play was a “strong-willed businesswoman” portraying “the loneliness and confusion such independence may create.” Prior to that, she studied at Alvin Ailey for two summers.

While she was devoted to the arts and found much joy in performing, she also developed a love and appreciation for the sciences. Continuing her education in the sciences, she went on to get Masters in biology from New York University in 1987 while simultaneously being a research technician and a teaching assistant there. She says of her career decision of pursuing biology and research: “To be honest, I still do not think I ever ‘decided’ to become a biologist. I simply found myself hooked on generating data and answering questions that had not been answered before.” Of her experience as a graduate student working as a research technician, she recalls being one of the few minority students. While having a supportive mentor and respective postdoctoral fellows, often times she was faced with racial stereotypes where she was questioned by several of the black clean up staff for wanting to enter the “white world” and occasionally being mistaken for the clean up staff herself during visits to her lab by other distinguished scientists

Following her completion of her Masters, Bargonetti went on to get her Ph.D. from New York University from 1987 – 1990. Her thesis paper focused on how to control DNA replication. From there, she went on to receive her post-doctoral training at Columbia University from 1990 – 1994 where she studied the tumor suppressor properties of the p53 gene and protein. Her discovery of the functions of the p53 protein was by accident as she initially used it as a control for one of her experiments aimed at studying a cancer-causing virus. However, it was then she stumbled upon the fact that p53 was really rather significant as it acted a transcription factor with the ability to specifically bind to the DNA and thus transcribe the genome. In her experiment, she found that the p53 protein could thus lead to downstream production of a viral protein which negatively regulated p53 and in effect, give damaged cells the advantage of proliferating out of control. She quickly tried to convince her lab members of her discovery and eventually published a paper.

Unfortunately, even during the time of her biggest discovery and one of the major contributions to science, she was still faced with racial discrimination. As she wrote a grant proposal for the Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Cancer Fellowship, she was told that the grant she received would be one specifically geared towards minorities with the underlying assumption that that one was the least competitive. However, the fellowship itself was known to be prestigious and rather competitive. She was awarded the fellowship in 1991 and while she did not receive the fellowship geared toward minorities, she did get the Honorable Mention Award-NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship for Minorities.

Following her postdoctoral training, Bargonetti was offered an assistant professorship position at City University of New York at Hunter College, which she graciously accepted as it was known for being a minority institution with students primarily of black, Hispanic and Asian origin. The biological studies department at Hunter College is also part of the Research Centers in Minority Institution programs of the National Institutes of Health. Furthermore, in 1997, she was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from William Clinton for “scholarly work in cancer related studies of cell growth and gene expression and involvement of undergraduate, graduate and especially minority students in the discovery process.” She became a full-time professor at Hunter College in 2007 and the Chair of the MCD PhD subprogram of the CUNY Graduate Center in 2009 to 2015.

She currently has her own laboratory located in the Belfer Research Building as part of the Weill Cornell Medical College and continues to teach at Hunter College. She is married to Nicholas Chavarria, a bilingual special education evaluator for the Board of Education and has two sons – Carlo and Milo, one dark and one blond, whom she uses to explain genetic phenomenon.

Bargonetti was featured on a PBS series called "American Graduate Day" in 2015. Additionally, she spoke at a TedX "Borders and Belonging" event at City University of New York (CUNY) in 2016.

Publications