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In this interview, AIP Oral Historian David Zierler interviews Vipul Periwal, a physicist at NIH who leads the Computational Medicine Section in the Laboratory of Biological Modeling.  Periwal describes his childhood and education in India, and the profound effect of the Feynman lectures, which he stumbled upon at his college in India and which inspired his successful transfer to Caltech. Periwal discusses his graduate work at Princeton and the development of his dissertation on the heterotic string field theory and string perturbation theory, his work at a post-doc at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC-Santa Barbara, and his time at the Institute for Advanced Study. After teaching at Princeton, Periwal describes how his work with a molecular biology startup at Cornell led to his employment at the NIH.  In the final portion of the interview, Periwal explains how he has drawn on his long experience in theoretical physics to pursue biological modelling projects at NIH which push forward the capacity to predict disease progression.

AIP Oral Historian David Zierler interviews Dr. Mary Gaillard, Professor of the Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley and Affiliate Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Dr. Gaillard discusses her experiences as an undergraduate at Hollins College in Virginia, and as a graduate student first at Columbia University, then at the University of Paris at Orsay. She describes her subsequent research on kaons and baryon decay while working for the French National Center for Scientific Research at CERN, her year-long collaboration with Ben Lee at Fermilab, and her eventual return to the United States as the first woman to be a tenured professor in the Department of Physics at UC Berkeley, focusing in particular on the working environment at each institution. The remainder of the interview deals with the state of theoretical physics over the course of her career and through to the present.

AIP Oral Historian David Zierler interviews Daniel Larson, Senior Investigator at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health. In this interview Larson discusses growing up in a family of scientists—both 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 Larson’s subsequent work studying the role of splicing factor mutations in causing cancers at the National Cancer Institute.

In this interview, AIP Oral Historian David Zierler interviews high energy physicist Sekazi Mtingwa. Mtingwa describes his upbringing in Atlanta, life under segregation as a child, and his early interests as a budding scientist. He discusses his undergraduate education at MIT, where he developed his interest in theoretical physics and became involved in student protests in the late 1960s. Mtingwa describes his graduate work at Princeton, the cultural differences he experienced there versus at MIT, and his dissertation, which focused on collisions of elementary particles at high energies. He describes his postdoc at the University of Rochester, and some of the changes he felt personally that led to his decision to change his name. Mtingwa discusses his work at Fermilab, where he worked on creating the Antiproton Source, and his decision to move to Argonne Lab to work on plasma wakefield accelerators. Mtingwa describes his decision to build up the physics program at North Carolina A&T and his work at Morgan State. At the end of the interview, Mtingwa discusses his work in recent years, which has included trips to Africa to expand science education, supporting minorities in science, and his service for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews N. David Mermin, Horace White Professor of Physics Emeritus at Cornell University. Mermin recounts his childhood in New Haven and his undergraduate work at Harvard, where he worked with Andrew Gleason and did his senior thesis on the Jordan Curve Theorem. Mermin describes his thesis work with on superconductivity with Paul Martin and the turn of luck that led to his fellowship at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. He explains why his most formative physics education occurred during his time in Birmingham and describes many of his most important collaborations as a professor at Cornell. Mermin explains his delight in pursuing obscure areas of research in physics and why he is interested in the relationship between problems in quantum foundations and the nature of scientific knowledge. In the last portion of the interview, Mermin shares his view on the various categories that comprise scientific breakthrough. 

AIP Oral Historian David Zierler interviews Dr. Jenny Glusker of the Fox Chase Cancer Center. 

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Sergey Leikin, Chief of Section on Physical Biochemistry at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, at the NIH. Leikin recounts his childhood and education in Russia and his research at the Institute of High Temperatures of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Leikin explains the series of events leading to his postdoc at the NIH and how the health challenges that his son faced at the time proved to be formative in the development of his career. Leikin describes his work on lipid bilayers, and the final portion of the interview covers his recent work on bone diseases in children.

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Arthur Bienenstock, professor emeritus of photon science and associate director of the Wallenberg Research Link at Stanford University. Bienenstock describes his childhood in New York City and his education at the Bronx High School of Science, his studies at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, and his graduate work at Harvard. Bienenstock describes his postdoc work Harwell, the atomic energy research lab in England, his start as an assistant professor at Harvard, and his work in Washington at the Naval Research Lab and the National Bureau of Standards. Bienenstock discusses his move to Stanford, and the influence of the anti-war protests that were taking place in the late 1960s. He discusses the various strategies he has employed to balance his research and administrative duties over the years, and his involvement with the synchrotron radiation laboratory and with SLAC. Toward the end of the discussion, Bienenstock discusses his work in the realm of science policy at the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House and as special assistant to the president for federal research policy at Stanford.

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Claudio Pellegrini, professor emeritus of physics at UCLA. Pellegrini describes his childhood and education in Italy, and his research at the Frascati Lab in Rome, where he built a diffusion cloud chamber to do an experiment on photoproduction using an electron synchrotron. Pellegrini describes his graduate work at the University of Rome, his work at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, and the circumstances leading to his work as a visiting scientist at Berkeley National Laboratory. Pellegrini describes his initial work at SLAC in 1965 and his growing interest in free-electron lasers in the mid-1970s during his work back at Frascati, and his decision to begin work at Brookhaven on the National Synchrotron Light Source. Pellegrini discusses his research and the lab he built at UCLA, where he worked on instability theory among other projects. In the last part of the interview, Pellegrini describes his recent work at SLAC, where he has continued his work in x-ray free-electron lasers, and he shares his ideas on what the past 400 years of scientific advances might tell us about discoveries in the future.

AIP Oral Historian David Zierler interviews Richard Pastor, Chief of the Laboratory of Membrane Biophysics in the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health. Dr. Pastor discusses his early life on Long Island, his graduate studies in biophysics at Syracuse University under Jerry Goodisman and Harvard under Martin Karplus, focusing especially on the work of the Karplus group on membrane biophysics. Pastor discusses his choice to work at NIH and the FDA rather than in the pharmaceutical industry. The interview concludes with a discussion of the relevance of Dr. Pastor’s work to current virology.