He received his licentiate from University of Istanbul in Turkey in 1943 and taught high school in Ankara for the next four years.
In 1959/60, he worked at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, where he became closely acquainted with Niels Bohr; in 1967/68 he was visiting professor at the University of Washington in Seattle.
In 2009, Merzbacher was the recipient of the Francis Slack Award from the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society.
From 1977 to 1982 he served as chairman of the Department of Physics at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (UNC).
He married Ann Townsend Reid and together they had four children: Celia, Charles, Matthew and Mary (deceased).