In this interview Daniel Larson, Senior Investigator at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health,discusses growing up in a family of scientistsboth parents were microbiologists and his two brothers chemists. Larson discusses his early aspirations toward engineering and his introduction to physics as an undergraduate at Ohio State University, his trajectory from optics to biophysics, and his work as a graduate student at Cornell, emphasizing developments in microscopy techniques for studying viruses. He describes his postdoctoral fellowship at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and his growing interest in genomics. The remainder of the interview focuses on Larsons subsequent work studying the role of splicing factor mutations in causing cancers at the National Cancer Institute.