Judith Kimble is Vilas Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator (since 1994). Her lab is interested broadly in the molecular regulation of animal development, with a focus on stem cell self-renewal, fate specification and reprogramming in Caenorhabditis elegans We caught up with Judith after she delivered her Keynote Lecture at the 2019 Santa Cruz Developmental Biology Meeting, and heard about her circuitous route to basic research, her passion for black boxes in science and why London is her cabin the woods.