Sherilynn Black

Sherilynn Black, PhD is the Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement, providing national leadership in many areas of faculty and leadership advancement. She also designs institutional interventions that develop thriving systems, advance data-driven behavioral change, and optimize mentorship practices. Dr. Black is an Assistant Professor of the Practice of Medical Education and engages in social neuroscience research to better understand the motivators and underlying behaviors that impact experiences in the academy. She examines the role of contextual affordances in the effectiveness of interventions designed to advance culture in local units. Dr. Black has long-standing expertise in creating interventions to increase representation among faculty and students across disciplines and leads work nationally to catalyze systemic change in academia.

Dr. Black previously served as the founding Director of OBGD in the Duke University School of Medicine and was also a Principal Investigator of the NIH-IMSD funded Duke Biosciences Collaborative for Research Engagement (BioCoRE) Program. She sits on several institutional advisory boards and holds a number of national appointments and roles relating to faculty development and advancement with the NIH, HHMI, AAMC, Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, and the Society for Neuroscience. She served on the Advisory Committee of the Director of the NIH (WGD) and is currently appointed as an ad-hoc member of NIGMS Council at NIH. She serves as co-chair of the National Academies Roundtable on Mentorship, Professional Development and Well-Being and is the co-chair of the IvyPlus Faculty Advancement Network and National Institute. In 2025, she became the Monitoring Editor of CBE Life Sciences Education.

Dr. Black has won several distinctions for her work, including the Samuel DuBois Cook Society award, the Duke University EDI award, the Dean’s Award for Inclusive Excellence in Graduate Education, the Duke University Centennial Trailblazer distinction, and was named as a Cell Press Top 100 Inspiring Black Scientists in America and a Principal Facilitator for the national Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research (CIMER). She earned her B.S. in Psychology and Biology with highest honors at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill as a Morehead-Cain Scholar. She earned her Ph.D. in Neurobiology at Duke University and completed additional studies in educational statistics and intervention assessment in the School of Education at UNC–Chapel Hill.