Maurice J. Kernan was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, the eldest of four siblings. His father worked for an insurance company; his mother was a housewife. A love of and interest in nature was nurtured during trips to a nearby area of salt marsh and sand dunes, known as Bull Island, where he explored and watched birds (many of his science projects in school were nature-based and came from his time there); he was also an avid reader, a sailor, and interested in cartography. Kernan began in public school but then switched to a Jesuit school around the time he was eight years old, staying there until he graduated. He matriculated at Trinity College in his hometown, intent on pursuing the biological sciences for his undergraduate education. While there, he developed an interest in genetics and was given a unique opportunity to conduct summer research with a Trinity alumnus, Mittur Jagadish, on the Cornell University campus in the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research. Kernan's project focused on nitrogen fixation done by a symbiotic bacterium, Rhizobium, in the root nodules of legume plants, specifically trying to isolate the rec-A gene from that bacterium by complementation—testing transformed, rec-A deficient E. coli with bits of Rhizobium DNA. While at Cornell he also heard a lecture from Allan C. Spradling, who, with Gerald M. Rubin, had just figured out how to make transgenic Drosophila with P elements. After earning his degree, he moved to the United States for graduate research in genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, joining Barry Ganetzky's Drosophila laboratory; his doctoral research led to a pair of Cell papers in the early 1990s. Kernan undertook postdoctoral work in Drosophila on mechanotransduction with Charles S. Zuker (Pew Scholar Class of 1988) at the University of California, San Diego, and from there he accepted a faculty position at SUNY Stony Brook. At the end of the interview Kernan discusses setting up his laboratory and research program and learning to be a laboratory manager. He also discusses funding, teaching, balancing family life with his career, competition and collaboration, the nation's scientific agenda, and the Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences.