Professor Church grew up in Virginia and received a B.S. in Chemistry at James Madison University.  After taking a year off to work in a hospital where he realized that studying the chemical causes of psychoactive drug side effects would be much more interesting than studying medicine, he obtained his Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry at Emory University in Atlanta GA.  It was here that he was able to form a happy marriage between his two favorite science interests: analytical instrumentation and neuroscience.  Having never been west of the Mississippi, he accepted a postdoctoral appointment at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif. working in the Clayton Foundation Peptide Biology Lab for Wiley Vale.  He initially came to Trinity in 1988 as a Visiting Professor in the Chemistry Department and was fortunate to be able to return to Trinity in 1995 in a joint appointment in the Chemistry Department and the Neuroscience Program.  He serves on the Health Professions Advising Committee, the IACUC, and is the faculty liaison for both the Women's Soccer team and the Softball team.