James N. Michaels is Director of the Physical Chemistry Manufacturing Laboratory in the Manufacturing Division of Merck and Co., Inc. This groups focuses on troubleshooting, process scale-up, and product transfer from research into manufacturing.

Dr. Michaels received his B.S. and M.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and his Sc.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He spent six years on the Chemical Engineering faculty at U.C. Berkeley, after which he joined the Central Research Laboratory of Mobil Corporation, where he worked on a variety of projects ranging from oxidation catalysis to characterization of reservoir rock wettability. He left Mobil in 1993 to start the Physical Chemistry Manufacturing Laboratory at Merck.