Reina Maruyama, Associate Professor of Physics at Yale, is interviewed by David Zierler. Maruyama discusses her appointments in the Yale Quantum Institute and her role as chair-elect for the Yale Women Faculty Forum. She recounts childhood in Japan and the circumstances of her family’s move to the United States and how her interests in science helped her acclimate to American culture. Maruyama explains her decision to attend Columbia as an undergraduate and she discusses a formative summer internship at Los Alamos where she worked on atomic physics. She describes her graduate work under the direction of Norval Fortson at the University of Washington in atomic lasers and optical communications. Maruyama discusses her postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley to join the CUORE experiment to look for neutrino-less double beta decays, which in turn led to her joining IceCube at Wisconsin. She explains how this worked served as an entrée into her interests in astrophysics and cosmology, and she describes the factors that led to her joining the faculty at Yale. Maruyama discusses building her lab and the diverse research she is pursuing including many exciting developments in quantum technology, and in the last part of the interview, she explains how she hopes to contribute to solving the mystery of dark matter.