In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Richard Casten, D. Allan Bromley Professor of Physics Emeritus at Yale, and consultant for the Facility for Rare Ion Beams at Michigan State. Casten recounts his childhood in Manhattan and his decision to attend Holy Cross for his undergraduate studies, where he pursued a degree in physics from the outset. He describes the long term benefits of a degree that required significant coursework in the humanities, and how he came to focus on nuclear physics as a research focus. Casten describes his graduate work at Yale and his work with Allan Bromley, who at the time was working on lower energy accelerators. Casten explains the major research questions in nuclear physics at that time, and he describe his research in the Coulomb excitation in the osmium isotopes. He recounts his time at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, his work using the triton beam at Los Alamos, and his subsequent research on the tandem accelerator at Brookhaven. Casten explains the rise of interest in the interacting boson model, and he describes his decision to join the faculty at Yale where he directed the Wright Nuclear Structure Lab. He describes his research over the course of his tenure at Yale, and the import of the collaborations he has maintained with his colleagues in Cologne. At the end of the interview, Casten provides an overview of his key contributions, and he shares what is most compelling to him for the future of nuclear physics.