David Merritt was a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and before that at Rutgers University, New Jersey, whose research interests include galaxy dynamics and evolution, supermassive black holes, and computational astrophysics. He is a former Chair of the Division on Dynamical Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society and is a founding member of the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation at RIT. He is author of the graduate textbook Dynamics and Evolution of Galactic Nuclei (2013).