William H. Church Associate Professor
of Chemistry and Neuroscience

“You’re not going to tell me the answer, are you?” is a question that Bill Church gets from his research students all the time. And every time the answer is, “No, but let’s talk about it.” According to Church, this type of intellectual one-on-one interaction is the special, magical aspect of being a faculty member at Trinity. Independent, high-quality research carried out by undergraduates in close collaboration with their faculty advisers is considered by both the science faculty and the College’s administration to be an integral part of a science major’s education.

“One of the great pleasures that I take in directing undergraduate research students is participating in the intellectual transition that occurs when the student moves beyond the student working in the lab stage into the independent research assistant stage,” he says. “It is at this point that the student no longer looks to me for the answers to questions or for what experiment to do next. There is now the self-confidence and the ability to solve these issues on her own. Some of the most gratifying moments in my many years at Trinity have been when this transition occurs, usually late in the evening of our weekly ‘Research Night’ or on the way back from a professional meeting. There is something about this type of non-traditional professor-student interaction that tends to promote a different type of thinking in the student.

“And the culmination of this intellectual experience occurs as I watch my student present his work at a professional meeting, typically the annual American Chemical Society meeting or the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting, where scientists from all over the world meet to share their scientific advances. To see a junior or senior Trinity student engaged in meaningful conversation with Ph.D. chemists or neuroscientists about the research they have been conducting makes grading all of those Introductory Chemistry Problem sets worthwhile. I can’t think of a better place to do science than at Trinity College.”