Sunday M. Black is the Senior Project Manager at the Clinical Trials Access Collaborative (CTAC), where she coordinates the access initiatives that connect CTAC and its community partners to research opportunities at academic medical centers and community health systems across the country. She joined CTAC in 2025 after five years building community-engaged research infrastructure at Yale University, bringing a combination of corporate operations discipline, faith-community leadership, and on-the-ground trials engagement experience to the role.
From 2020 to 2025, Ms. Black served as Senior Project Manager for Community Engagement at the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation (YCCI) and Equitable Breakthroughs in Medicine Development, CTAC’s learning-phase initiative. In this role she partnered directly with community leaders to manage Yale’s nationally recognized Cultural Ambassadors program, a bi-directional partnership between YCCI, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Churches of Connecticut, and Junta for Progressive Action (serving the Hispanic community of New Haven). Through that program she helped ensure that Yale’s extensive trials portfolio was visible, accessible, and trustworthy to the communities Yale serves, contributing to the Center’s sustained progress toward approximately 30% participation by people of color in Yale clinical trials.
Ms. Black also helped develop and managed the YCCI Exposures Internship, a community-engaged pipeline program co-founded by community leaders together with Ms. Tesheia Harris and Dr. Allen Hsiao to introduce students from underrepresented backgrounds to careers in clinical research. She coordinated additional internship and fellowship initiatives across the Center and oversaw the day-to-day operations of YCCI’s broader community-engagement portfolio focused on expanding research access. Across both Cultural Ambassadors and YCCI Exposures, she was instrumental in building the operational backbone, including trainee logistics, partner communications, event coordination, and reporting, that allowed Yale’s community-engagement model to scale and ultimately serve as a template for similar programs at peer CTSA institutions.
Before joining Yale in 2020, Ms. Black spent many years in management roles at The Hartford, where she developed the operational rigor, vendor- and stakeholder-management skills, and project-portfolio discipline that now anchor her work at CTAC. She runs multi-site, multi-stakeholder programs the way a corporate program-management office does, with explicit timelines, defined deliverables, and accountable reporting.
Outside her professional role, Ms. Black serves as Conference Director of Christian Education for the AME Zion New England Conference and as Local Director of Christian Education at Mt. Olive AME Zion Church in Waterbury, Connecticut. She is a longtime Cultural Ambassador in her own right, an active community educator on health equity and clinical-research literacy, and a trusted bridge between faith communities and academic medical centers, a credibility that is exceptionally difficult to build and is central to the trust-based work CTAC does. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Business Management from Albertus Magnus College.
