Kenneth M. Merz, Jr

Biography

  Dr. Merz is the Chief Scientific Officer and serves on the Board of Directors. He is currently the Colonel Allan R. and Margaret G. Crow Term Professor of Chemistry at the University of Florida and a Member and Co-Director of the Quantum Theory Project. 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, Dr. Merz was an Assistant, Associate, and Professor of Chemistry at the Pennsylvania State University from 1989-2005. He also has worked in industry (1998-2001) as the Senior Director of the Center for Informatics and Drug Discovery (CIDD) at Pharmacopeia, Inc. and as the Senior Director of the ADMET Research and Development Group in the Accelrys software division of Pharmacopeia. Dr. Merz is a recognized leader in the field of computational chemistry, publishing over 150 articles in peer-reviewed journals and giving more than 150 presentations worldwide. He has received a number of honors including 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). He received his BS from Washington College and his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from The University of Texas.

Research Interest

 Business