In this interview Vipul Periwal, a physicist at NIH who leads the Computational Medicine Section in the Laboratory of Biological Modeling, describes his childhood and education in India, and the profound effect of the Feynman lectures, which he stumbled upon at his college in India and which inspired his successful transfer to Caltech. Periwal discusses his graduate work at Princeton and the development of his dissertation on the heterotic string field theory and string perturbation theory, his work at a post-doc at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC-Santa Barbara, and his time at the Institute for Advanced Study. After teaching at Princeton, Periwal describes how his work with a molecular biology startup at Cornell led to his employment at the NIH. In the final portion of the interview, Periwal explains how he has drawn on his long experience in theoretical physics to pursue biological modelling projects at NIH which push forward the capacity to predict disease progression.