David Christian (DPhil Oxford, 1974) is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union by training, but since the 1980s he has studied world history on very large scales, or “big history.” He taught at Macquarie University in Sydney from 1975 to 2000 before taking a position at San Diego State University in 2001. In January 2009 he returned to Macquarie University. From 2009 to 2013 he was a “world class universities distinguished professor” at Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul, and over the same period, he also held a position as a James Marsh Professor-at-Large at the University of Vermont. He was founding president of the International Big History Association and is cofounder, with Bill Gates, of the Big History Project, which has built a free online high-school syllabus in big history. He is the director of Macquarie University’s Big History Institute and designer and lead teacher on Macquarie University’s Coursera-based MOOC (massive open online course) and Specialization in big history. He is co-creator of Macquarie University Big History School, which provides K-12 online courses in big history. He has delivered keynotes at conferences around the world, including the Davos World Economic Forum, and his TED Talk on the history of the universe has been viewed more than eight million times. In May 2017 he was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by North Carolina State University.