Sherilynn Black, PhD, is the Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement at Duke University. She provides leadership in faculty advancement and development for pretenure, mid-career, and non-tenure system faculty. She has expertise in creating interventions to increase representation and equity among faculty and students across disciplines and leads national efforts to catalyze systemic change in academia.
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 served as the founding Director of the Office of Biomedical Graduate Diversity for Duke University School of Medicine and was a Principal Investigator of the NIH-IMSD-funded Duke Biosciences Collaborative for Research Engagement (BioCoRE) Program.
She holds national appointments with the NIH, HHMI, the 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 NIH (Working Group on Diversity) and has won a number of distinctions, including the Samuel DeBois Cook Society Award, the Dean’s 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’.
Black earned her BS in Psychology and Biology with highest honors at UNC-Chapel Hill as a Morehead-Cain Scholar. She earned her PhD in Neurobiology at Duke University and completed additional studies in educational statistics and intervention assessment in the School of Education at UNC-Chapel Hill.