Trustee
Deborah A. Gerbert, MS, PA-C
Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida
[email protected]
Deborah Gerbert, MS, PA-C, serves as a trustee on the PA Foundation Board of Trustees, and previously served as treasurer of the Board. She has a long history of service to the Academy and to the PA profession, including serving as AAPA president in 1994-1995 and as Speaker of the House from 1991-1993. She has chaired or served on many AAPA committees and councils and was the Academy’s representative to the American Medical Association from 1996-2004. She believes she caught the bug to get involved in PA organizations while a PA student at the University of Oklahoma in the late 1970s, when four former AAPA presidents were on the faculty.
Other areas of service for Gerbert include a two-year term on the Finance Committee of the Physician Assistant Education Association, three years of service on the PA Foundation Board of Trustees, and, beginning in 2015, and a position on the PA History Society’s Board of Trustees. She was the 1998 recipient of the AAPA House of Delegates Outstanding Service Award, the 2002 recipient of the Florida Academy of PAs Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2013 recipient of the Faculty of the Year Award at Nova SE University Jacksonville PA program.
After graduating from the Oklahoma PA program, Gerbert moved to Florida, where she immediately got involved with the state PA academy. She was elected secretary of the Florida Academy of PAs in 1982 and president in 1984. She has represented Florida in the AAPA House of Delegates since 1980 and has served on numerous committees, her favorite being the Legislative and Governmental Affairs Committee. She was appointed to the PA Council of the Board of Medicine in 2003 and chaired the council from 2006 to 2010.
Gerbert has spent her entire clinical career in pediatrics, in Jacksonville, Florida. She has worked in an outpatient clinic in the University of Florida teaching hospital and in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit in Wolfson Children’s Hospital, where she is currently a hospitalist PA for the general pediatric service. In all of these settings she has enjoyed working with PA students and pediatric residents. More recently, Gerbert took a five-year hiatus from clinical practice to become the founding program director at Nova Southeastern University’s PA Program in Jacksonville.
Gerbert completed her undergraduate degree in biology at Emory University in Atlanta in 1976 and graduated from the University of Oklahoma PA program in 1980. She is married to Jeff and they have a daughter, Kim.