Kenneth Malcolm Merz, Jr

Endowed Chairs College of Natural Science

• Joseph Zichis Endowed Chair in Chemistry
• Established through a gift from the estate of Joseph Zichis

• Chemistry

Bio

Kenneth M. Merz, professor of chemistry and Joseph Zichis Chair in Chemistry, develops theoretical and computational tools and explores their application to biological problems, including structure and ligand-based drug design, mechanistic enzymology and model verification and validation. He is currently the director for the Institute of Cyber-Enabled Research (iCER) at MSU.

Merz received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Washington College and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin, where he focused on computational chemistry. InAugust 2013, he came to MSU from the University of Florida where he was a UF Research Foundation Professor, the Edmund H. Prominski Professor of Chemistry and a member of the Quantum Theory Project.

In 2013, Merz was named the next editor in chief of the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling and was selected to organize the 251st ACS National Meeting & Exposition in 2016. Other notable achievements include a National Institutes of Health FIRST Award and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a fellow of both the American Chemical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.