Kerri received her PhD from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in 2006. Before coming to Oxford Brookes University, she was a Research Officer at the University of Oxford, a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona, and has also taught Japanese and linguistics courses at Hawai‘i Pacific University and the University of Hawai‘i. Kerri’s research is mainly concerned with the origins and development of the Japonic language family, which consists of the varieties of Japanese spoken in Japan and the Ryukyuan islands. She has also worked on Ainu, Middle Korean, and several Altaic languages spoken in East Asia. She continues to work on the development of the Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese, which is a long-term research project which aims to develop a comprehensive annotated digital corpus of all extant texts in Japanese from the earliest attested stage of the Japanese language. Kerri has been a member of three research projects based at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL): NINJAL Diachronic Corpus project, The Japanese Lexicon: A Rendaku Encyclopedia, and A Diachronic Contrastive Study of Japanese Interrogatives.