Selwyn M. Vickers, MD, FACS, has been senior vice president of medicine and dean of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) School of Medicine since October 2013. As dean, Dr. Vickers leads the UAB School of Medicine’s main campus in Birmingham as well as the school’s regional campuses in Montgomery, Huntsville, and Tuscaloosa. UAB School of Medicine is part of UAB Medicine, one of the 10 largest public academic medical centers and the third largest public hospital in the U.S. Dr. Vickers holds the James C. Lee Jr. Endowed Chair at the School of Medicine and is board chair of the University of Alabama Health Services Foundation, a faculty practice plan with over $1.4 billion in revenue. He also serves as chair of UAB Medicine’s Joint Operating Leadership Committee (JOLC).
A world-renowned surgeon, pancreatic cancer researcher, and pioneer in health disparities research, Dr. Vickers is a member of the National Academy of Medicine (Institute of Medicine) and the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars. He has served on the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Board of Trustees and Johns Hopkins University Board of Trustees. In addition, he has served as president of the Society for Surgery of the Alimentary Tract and the Southern Surgical Association, and is president-elect of the American Surgical Association, the oldest and most prestigious surgical society. Dr. Vickers has played an important advisory role since the onset of the COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic in 2020. He serves on the Executive Committee of Alabama Governor Kay Ivey’s Coronavirus Task Force and as co-chair of The University of Alabama (UA) System Campus Health and Safety Task Force, which was charged with developing reentry plans for the system’s three campuses in Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, and Huntsville and other participating higher education institutions. To that end, he sponsored development of and was the contact PI for the $37 million federal grant for GuideSafeTM, a higher education reentry platform and testing program developed by a group of experts at UAB—working in partnership with entities that included Apple and Google—and made available first to all colleges and universities in Alabama, and later to any interested institution