Dr. Merkin serves on the Board of the California Institute of Technology and the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. He is the Co-founder of Fastercures. He has established the Richard Merkin Foundation for Stem Cell Research at the Broad Institute at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Richard Merkin Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Brain Sciences Institute, and the Richard Merkin Foundation for Neural Regeneration at UCLA. He is on the board of the California Nano Systems Institute and serves on many other boards that focus on science, healthcare and finance.
Inspired by the XPRIZE Foundation, Dr. Merkin launched the Heritage Health Prize, a $3 million global incentivized competition seeking to achieve a fundamental breakthrough in our ability to predict future hospitalization.