David Wineland, University of Oregon, USA, shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2012 with Serge Haroche, Collège de France, Paris, for his work devising methods to study the quantum mechanical behavior of individual atomic ions. At the 2025 Frontiers in Optics (FiO) meeting in Denver, CO, USA, held from 26 to 30 October, he will give a plenary talk exploring how quantum state superpositions and entanglement are employed with trapped atomic ions in spectroscopy, clocks and quantum computation. OPN spoke with Wineland before the meeting to hear about his career in quantum science.