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David Merritt is an American astrophysicist and professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York. He received his PhD in Astrophysical Sciences from Princeton University and held postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto. His fields of specialization include dynamics and evolution of galaxies, supermassive black holes, and computational astrophysics.

David Merritt is a former Chair of the Division on Dynamical Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society. He is a founding member of the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation at RIT.

His scientific contributions include Osipkov-Merritt models, black hole spin flips, the Leonard-Merritt mass estimator, the M-sigma relation, stellar systems with negative temperatures, and rotational Brownian motion.