Sherilynn Black

Sherilynn Black is the associate vice provost for faculty advancement, providing leadership in many areas of faculty advancement including support for pre-tenure and mid-career faculty, professional development for non-tenure system faculty, and mentoring. She also leads initiatives to increase diversity among the faculty ranks. Dr. Black is an assistant professor of the practice of medical education and engages in social neuroscience research on the effectiveness of interventions to promote diversity and equity in academia. She has expertise in creating interventions to increase representation and equity 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 the Office of Biomedical Graduate Diversity for 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 holds several national appointments relating to faculty development and advancement with the NIH, HHMI, AAMC, The Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, and the Society for Neuroscience. She currently serves on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health (Working Group on Diversity) and has won a number of distinctions, including the Samuel Debois Cook Society Award, the Deans Award for Inclusive Excellence in Graduate Education, and the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Award. She was named one of Cell‘s ‘Most Inspiring Black Scientists in America’. Dr. Black 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.