In this interview, Hari Shroff discusses his early childhood in India and England before his family settled in Seattle. Shroff describes his decision to start college at age 14 at the University of Washington and his graduate work at University of California, Berkeley where he made molecules that could optically report on a local force that was being transduced across molecules. Shroff discusses his desire to transform this research into something with wide societal value, which led to his post-doctorate work at Janelia Farm in Virginia where he worked on the photactivated localization microscopy (PALM) technique. In the last portion of the interview Shroff describes his transition to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2009, and he recounts his decision to come to NIH over Yale because of the opportunities it afforded to build lab that is continuously pushing the boundary for the kind of imaging that microscopes can create. The interview concludes with Shroff explaining his interest in deep learning as one solution to making sense of the enormous amount of data generated in the health sciences.