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.  It was here that he was able to form a happy marriage between his two favorite science interests: analytical instrumentation and neurochemistry.  Having never been west of the Mississippi, he accepted a postdoctoral appointment at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif. He returned back east for a short stint at Trinity as a Visiting Professor and then took a 5 year “sabbatical” to teach down at East Carolina University before returning to Trinity in 1995.