Merritt attended East Hampton High School in 1949-50 and in 1951-52. He returned to Connecticut in 1954 and in 1957 attended Mitchell College in New London. After one year he drove to Alaska and attended the University of Alaska graduating in 1966. During his college years he worked as a heavy equipment operator and surveyor and on graduating joined the staff of the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska. He worked at the Institute in a variety of capacities and in 1983 as Head of Technical Support Services moved to the University's statewide administration as VP for Human Resources. In 1994 he became Assistant to the Chancellor of the Fairbanks Campus and left that position in 1986 to become Associate Director of the Geophysical Institute. Over the years at the Institute he worked twice in Antarctica at McMurdo Base and at the Amundsen Scott South Pole Base receiving the Antarctic Service Metal and has a glacier named in his honor in Antarctica. In 1969 he spent two months as a sea ice technician on the first commercial transit of the Northwest Passage aboard the 1,005 foot S.S. Manhattan, Humble Oil's research voyage for exploration of a route for transporting Alaska Oil to the East Coast. In the 1970s he served as Assistant Supervisor of the Poker Flat Research Rocket Range in Alaska. in 1994 Merritt became Executive Director of the University of Alaska Technology Development Corporation and retired in 1997. He then formed Innovation Consulting, Inc. and serves as CEO and senior consultant to this day providing educational institution management services. He is enjoying sailing and long distance bicycling tours and in 2012 bicycled from Prague, Czech Republic to Vienna, Austria to Bratislava, Slovakia and finished after that 550 miles in Budapest, Hungary.