Allan Jaffe has spent his long academic career investigating the use of biomarkers to characterize the pathobiology of acute cardiovascular disease. For that reason, he is a Laboratory Medicine Division Chair at the Mayo Clinic. His initial efforts focused on coagulation and fibrinolysis and resulted in an appreciation for the pro-coagulant effects of plasminogen activators. At that time, he was also actively involved in defining how to best measure and use CKMB to determine the diagnosis and prognosis (infarct size) of patients with acute myocardial infarction. Subsequently, with investigators at Washington University, he helped to develop and was responsible for the validation studies of the first cardiac troponin I assay. His efforts subsequently have focused on the measurement of cardiac troponin and how to use the value obtained from clinical studies. In addition, he has expanded his interests into the area of heart failure and has published extensively on the use of both cardiac troponin and natriuretic peptides to characterize patients with both acute and chronic heart failure. An addition interest relates to the intersection of depression and heart disease where he was the co-Chair of the ENRICHD in post acute myocardial infarction patients. He is a major of most of the major cardiology and clinical chemistry editorial boards and sits on most of the major guidelines committees for the use of these biomarkers.