Grant Murphy is the Director of Protein Engineering at Merck & Co., where he leads a team of protein engineers working at the interface of chemistry, biology, and engineering. The Merck Protein Engineering group has engineered dozen enzymes for the synthesis of APIs to enable discovery, development, and clinical supply. The group is actively engaged in developing new protein engineering and computational methods.
Prior to Merck, Grant was a NIH Kirschstein fellow at Princeton University with Professor Michael Hecht. As a postdoc, Grant developed computational methods to design de novo protein libraries and developed screens and selections to identify de novo enzymes. This work led to the creation a completely de novo enzyme.
Grant earned his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina working with Professor Brian Kuhlman. As a graduate student, Grant wrote flexible backbone design algorithms as part of the Rosetta protein design software. Using these methods, Grant designed and experimentally confirmed some of the first computationally designed proteins.