AIP Oral Historian David Zierler interviews Keir Neuman, Senior Investigator at the Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health. In this interview Neuman describes his childhood in Newfoundland, a formative year he spent in Paris for high school, and the circumstances that led him to set off on his own in California, which led ultimately to his enrollment at the University of California-Berkeley, his research at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and his decision to focus on biophysics while pursuing a Ph.D. at Princeton, where he began his long-term collaboration with Steve Block. Neuman discusses his work at Stanford on high precision measurements and the discovery of pauses in RNA polymerase and his dissertation on optical trapping of transcription. He describes his ongoing study of RNA and DNA with the Human Frontier program in France and his decision to come to the NIH where he continues to study DNA topology. The interview concludes with Neuman’s explanation of why he is optimistic about the future of his field and why NIH is well-positioned to be a leader in future advances.