Robert H. Kretsinger received his PhD in biophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Alex Rich in 1964. In 1967 he set up a protein crystallography lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Virginia, where he¿presently teaches, and determined the crystal structure of parvalbumin as well as describing the EF-hand domain in 1971. He has subsequently investigated the structures, functions, and evolution of various EF-hand homologs, along with other protein families. From 1978 to 1995, he directed a national facility to build multiwire area detectors for x-ray diffraction and to collect data from protein crystals.