Kenneth M. Merz Jr.

Kenneth M. Merz Jr. is an American biochemist and molecular biologist currently the Joseph Zichis Chair and a distinguished university professor at Michigan State University and editor-in-chief of American Chemical Society's Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. A highly cited expert in his field, his research interests are in computational chemistry and biology and computer-aided drug design (CADD).

Education and early life Merz was born in Niagara Falls, New York, on January 24, 1959. His family moved to Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, where he graduated from Harriton High School in 1977. Merz studied chemistry at the undergraduate level at Washington College and where he graduated in 1981. While he was at University of Florida, he was named the Colonel Allan R. and Margaret G. Crow Term Professor, 2009-2011, the University of Florida Research Foundation (UFRF) Professor, In 2013, Merz moved to Michigan State University as a professor in the Chemistry and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Departments. Structure, Function and Dynamics of Lipid Bilayers K. M. Merz, Jr.; B. Roux Eds.; Birkhaüser: Boston, MA, 1996. Structure-Based Drug Design D. Ringe; C. R. Reynolds; K. M. Merz, Jr., Eds.; Cambridge University Press: Boston, MA, 2010

Awards

Election as an ACS Fellow (2010). Alumni Citation, Washington College (2011). Election as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1999). Open-source multi-GPU-accelerated QM/MM simulations with AMBER and QUICK; V. Cruzeiro; M. Manathunga; K. M. Merz, Jr.; A. W. Götz J. Chem Inf. Model 2021, 61, 2109–2115. A Second Generation Force Field for the Simulation of Proteins, Nucleic Acids and Organic Molecules; W. D. Cornell; P. Cieplak; C. I. Bayly; I. R. Gould; K. M. Merz, Jr. D. M. Ferguson; D. C. Spellmeyer; T. Fox; J. W. Cladwell; P. A. Kollman J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1995, 117, 5179-5197. Metal Ion Modeling Using Classical Mechanics; P. Li; K. M. Merz, Jr. Chemical Reviews, 2017, 117, 1564–1686. Atomic Charges Derived from Semiempirical Methods; B. H. Besler, K. M. Merz, Jr., and P. A. Kollman J. Comput. Chem.1990, 11, 431-439. Free Energy Perturbation Simulations of the Inhibition of Thermolysin: Prediction of the Free Energy of Binding of a New Inhibitor; K. M. Merz Jr. and P. A. Kollman J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1989, 111, 5649-5658. The Amber Biomolecular Simulation Program; D. A. Case; T. E. Cheatham, III; T. Darden; H. Gohlke; R. Luo; K. M. Merz, Jr.; A. Onufriev; C. Simmerling; B. Wang; R. J. Woods J. Comput. Chem. 2005, 26, 1668-1688. Harnessing the Power of Multi-GPU Acceleration into the Quantum Interaction Computational Kernel Program; M. Manathunga; C. Jin; V. Cruzeiro; Y. Miao; D. Mu; K. Arumugam; K. Keipert; H. M. Aktulga; K. M. Merz, Jr.; A. Goetz J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2021.