In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Edward F. (Joe) Redish, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Maryland. Redish reflects on the symbiotic nature of his interest in nuclear theory and physics education, and he describes his long collaboration in the latter field of Lillian McDermott. He recounts his childhood on Long Island and his developing interests in math and science. Redish describes his undergraduate education at Princeton where he was mentored by John Wheeler in studying unified electromagnetic fields from a pedagogical perspective. He discusses getting to know Charles Misner at Princeton, and he explains his decision to go to MIT for graduate school, where he conducted his thesis research under the direction of Felix Villars on nuclear reactions using quantum field theory. Redish explains the opportunities leading to his postdoctoral appointment at the Center for Theoretical Physics at Maryland and ultimately his ability to join the faculty and achieve tenure in the physics department there, in recognition of his work in three-body clustering problems. He describes the lengthy intellectual process of switching over entirely to physics education research in the early 1980s and why teaching at a large public university proved to be the ideal pedagogical proving ground for his interests. Redish discusses his entrě to the world of AAPT and what he saw as some of the orthodoxies in the field that were ripe for change, including making the field more student-centric. He describes his current project, NEXUS/Physics, which is an introductory physics for life sciences class that he developed in partnership with biologists, and he explains how this fits with his personal research interests that have delved recently into the biological realm. Redish explains the difficulty in mentoring physics education graduate students because of the expectation of their mastery of both physics and pedagogy, and at the end of the interview, he describes the Resources Framework that he is building as akin to a grand unified theory of physics education.