In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Antonina Roll-Mecak, Senior Investigator in the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health. Mecak recounts her childhood and education in Romania and she explains how both her family and Romanian culture were very encouraging of young women interested in pursuing a career in science. She describes her decision to go to New York to attend Cooper Union for undergraduate work, and she discusses her graduate research at Rockefeller University where she focused on protein structure from a biophysics perspective with Stephen Burley. Mecak describes her postdoctoral research with Ron Vale in force generation and single molecule fluorescence microscopy at University of California at San Francisco. She discusses the opportunities leading to her career at the NIH, and she describes the structural benefits of research at the NIH where the appetite for risk-taking is generally higher than at universities. Mecak discusses the centrality of studying tubulin codes as she was setting up her lab at the NIH, and she describes the value of being able to collaborate with clinicians in mutually beneficial ways. At the end of the interview, Mecak outlines some of the most exciting aspects in her current research agenda, and she explains why she will remain interested in neuron-degeneration for the foreseeable future.