After completing his residency in internal medicine in Minnesota in 1989, Dr. Kimerling left for the Thai-Cambodian border where he worked in a large refugee camp, then moved to rural Cambodia where he worked as a district physician, provincial program director and later as a tuberculosis/malaria consultant in Phnom Penh for Doctors Without Borders (MSF) Holland-Belgium. He spent four and a half years in this setting.
In 1994, he returned to University of Alabama-Birmingham (UAB) to become a Pulmonary Research Fellow and obtained a Masters of Public Health in Epidemiology. Dr. Kimerling was appointed Assistant Professor at UAB the following year, and Associate Professor in 2000 and held appointments in the Department of Medicine (Divisions of General Internal Medicine and Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, School of Medicine) and in the Department of Epidemiology (School of Public Health). Dr. Kimerling was the Director of UAB's International Tuberculosis Center, and was Principal Investigator/Director of the UAB Coordinating Site of the Gorgas TB Initiative since its inception in 1999.
Dr. Kimerling was the TB Medical Consultant to the Alabama Department of Public Health, and a member of the state TB Medical Advisory Council. Dr. Kimerling also served on the North American Region Executive Committee and was chairman of the TB in Prisons Workgroup of the International Union against TB and Lung Disease.
He is a member of the scientific panel of the World Health Organization's Multi-Drug Resistant TB Workgroup and a regular consultant to WHO (Geneva) on TB-related issues such as TB control in prisons and DOTS-Plus.
In 2008, Dr. Kimerling joined the TB program team at The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation where his focus is on international partnerships and innovation in TB control/uptake of new technologies.