Dr. D. William Provance, Jr. received a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in 1998. As a postdoctoral fellow at McLaughlin Research Institute, he utilized eGFP to trace the activities of Myosin Vb. In 2008, he moved to the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) and the field of diagnostic reagents. In collaboration with Dr. De Simone, he developed a proteinaceous receptacle from ß-barrel proteins that could accept the insertion of a large number of short amino acid sequences and generate chimeric proteins with the immunological characteristics of the inserted sequences.