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Dr. Kerby received both his undergraduate degree and medical degree from the University of Missouri at Kansas City in 1989. He completed his surgical residency in general surgery at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1999, along with a postdoctoral research fellowship in 1996. Following residency, Dr. Kerby served in the United States Air Force as an active duty surgeon until 2003, deploying as a combat trauma surgeon in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in 2002. Since his return to UAB in 2003, he has served as a clinically active acute care surgeon and was the chief of general surgery at the Birmingham VA Medical Center from 2009 through 2014. In 2014, he was named Director of the UAB Division of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery. The UAB Trauma Center is currently the only American College of Surgeons verified Level 1 Trauma Center in Alabama. Under Dr. Kerby’s leadership, the Division has expanded to 23 clinical faculty, established an Emergency General Surgery Service, an Inpatient Comprehensive Wound Service, and a Total Parenteral Nutrition Service. Trauma Center volume has also experienced record growth, with 6,700 trauma evaluations performed each year, making it one of the busiest trauma centers in the country. Dr. Kerby has also led efforts in collaboration with the Jefferson County Department of Public Health, civic and community leaders to establish a Hospital Based Violence Intervention Program at UAB aimed at curbing the impact of gun violence on our community. An active researcher, Dr. Kerby served as the principal investigator for the Alabama Resuscitation Center of the Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium network, an NIH funded multicenter trials network of traumatic injury and cardiac arrest, from 2005 through 2015. In addition, his group has a robust clinical trials and trauma outcomes effort established through the UAB Center for Injury Sciences (CIS) and participates as an active investigative site for the Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network (CIREN). Dr. Kerby has served as State Trauma Consultant for the Alabama Department of Public Health Office of Emergency Medical Systems since 2020, leading efforts to reorganize and fund the Alabama Trauma System with the goal of minimizing preventable deaths from trauma.
Dr. Kerby has established military-civilian partnerships between UAB and the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army, developing trauma-training programs for Air Force Pararescue personnel beginning in 2006. In addition, the Division of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery have hosted Air Force Special Operations Surgical Teams on a permanent basis since 2010, with nearly 30 active duty Air Force personnel embedded at UAB. Dr. Kerby has been a member of the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma (ACS COT) since 2016, where he served as Membership Committee Chair from 2018 – 2022. In March of 2022, Dr. Kerby began a four-year term as Chair of the ACS COT.