Kenneth Merz's Biography

Kenneth Merz, Professor, University of Florida

Kenneth M. Merz, Jr. is currently a University of Florida Research Foundation Professor and Edmund H. Prominski Professor of Chemistry at the University of Florida and a Member and Co-Director of the Quantum Theory Project. Presently, he has a total of fourteen graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in his research lab and is supported by major grants from the NIH and NSF. His research interest is in the application of theoretical and computational tools to biological problems including drug design, mechanistic enzymology and protein folding. Prior to his current position at the University of Florida he was an Assistant, Associate and Professor of Chemistry at the Pennsylvania State University from 1989-2005. He also has worked in industry (1998-2001) first as the Senior Director of the Center for Informatics and Drug Discovery (CIDD) at Pharmacopeia, Inc. and then as the Senior Director of the ADMET Research and Development Group in the Accelrys software division of Pharmacopeia. Dr. Merz carried out postdoctoral training at The University of California, San Francisco (1987-1989, with Peter Kollman) and at Cornell University (1986-1987, with Roald Hoffmann). He received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry at The University of Texas at Austin in 1985 (with M. J. S. Dewar) and his B.S. from Washington College, Chestertown, Maryland in 1981. He has received a number of honors including election as a Fellow of the American Chemical Society (2011), the 2010 ACS Award for Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research, election as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and he has held visiting professorships at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (Barcelona, Spain), École Polytechnique (Paris, France), University of Florence (Florence, Italy), The University of Strasbourg (Strasbourg, France), The University of Oviedo (Oviedo, Spain) and the ETH (Zurich, Switzerland).