Dr. Walker is Director of the National Center for Natural Products Research (NCNPR), and Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Mississippi. A native of Martin, Tennessee, his undergraduate pharmacy degree is from Mercer University (1975), and his doctorate in Pharmacology from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in 1979, with emphasis in the areas of renal and cardiovascular pharmacology, He spent periods in postdoctoral research at the Bosch Institute for Clinical Pharmacology in Stuttgart, Germany and in the Department of Physiology at Dartmouth Medical School. He joined the faculty at the University of Mississippi as a Research Assistant Professor in 1981, and has worked for much of his career on research related to the pharmacology of natural products.