Officers

Daniel de Pinho Barreiros | President

Daniel Barreiros is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Economics, Federal University of
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Professor at the Comparative History Graduate Program (PPGHC-UFRJ)
and at the International Political Economy Graduate Program (PEPI-UFRJ). He received a PhD
in Social History from the Fluminense Federal University, Niterói, Brazil, and is a U.S.
Department of State Alumni from the Study of the US Institute on United States Foreign Policy
(Research Fellow at the Department of Political Sciences and International Relations, University
of Delaware). His research is centered on the Big History of intersocietal conflict and
cooperation. Daniel founded the Big History Lab at UFRJ-Rio de Janeiro, the first Big History
research group in his country.

David LePoire | Vice President

Researches, develops, and applies science principles in environmental issues, Big History evolutionary trends, and particle scattering. He has a BS in Physics from CalTech, a PhD in Computer Science from DePaul, and over 30 years of experience at Argonne National Laboratory in the development of scientific analyses, software, training, and modeling. His research interests include Big History synergistic trends among energy, environment, organization, and information. He has presented at the IBHA conferences since the first in 2012 and has presented an IBHA webinar in Oct 2021. He has published articles in the Journal of Big History, the Evolution Almanac, and in 2020 co-edited a book with Andrey Korotayev concerning a Big History perspective of the singularity trend. He (along with Ken Solis) contributes to the “From the Journal” column of the newsletter and now also collaborates on the Emergence newsletter publication.  He has started a Big History Research Group for continued international virtual conferencing and online communication.

Ken Solis, MD, MA | Treasurer

Ken Solis is a retired internist and ER physician with a master’s degree in bioethics. His long trips to and from work over the years also gave him many hours to listen to lectures on other fields in the sciences, philosophy, and history. By coincidence, he was teaching “A Brief History of the Universe” to adults before he encountered David Christian’s big bistory lectures for “The Great Courses.” His special interest in big history is what thermodynamics, information theory, and complexity science might reveal about how systems have, depending on the circumstance, progressed, regressed, and diversified over time. He has also applied these disciplines to the formulation of an information-centric ethical theory that was published in JBH.

Board Members

Lowell Gustafson

Lowell Gustafson is currently a member of the IBHA Board, IBHA Treasurer, Associate Editor of the Journal of Big History, and editor of Origins: The Bulletin of the IBHA. He earned his PhD in Government and Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia in 1984 and has been on the Political Science faculty of Villanova University since 1986. Among his publications are “Big History and Political Science: Science, the deep past, and the political” in Craig Benjamin, Esther Quadackers, and David Baker, eds, The Routledge Companion to Big History, 2020; “SETI and Big History: Challenge and Extension,” Journal of Big History, IV(2); and Lowell Gustafson, David Blanks, Barry Rodrigue, co-editors, Science, Religion, and Deep Time, Routledge, forthcoming. He finds the development of an evidence based narrative of a 13.8 billion year series of developments from the big bang to present, along with reasoned expectations about the future, to be one of the great achievements of humanity. He highly values associating with others who share a fascination with integrating fields of knowledge and the meanings that a universe of knowledge offers humanity.

David Blanks

David Blanks is a medievalist by training whose early work focused on the social history of southern Europe, western attitudes towards Islam, monasticism, and medieval and early modern travel. He now works on more broadly theoretically issues, especially the philosophy and historiography of big history. Blanks is a Fulbright scholar who, after completing his Ph. D. at The Ohio State University in 1991, and doing a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Cincinnati, worked at the American University in Cairo from 1992 to 2015, and at Arkansas Tech University from 2015-2021. He is editor of the Journal of Big History.

Andrey Korotayev

Andrey Korotayev is a is an anthropologist, macro-historian, comparative political scientist, demographer and sociologist at National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow and Eurasian Center for Big History & System Forecasting, Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences. He engages in the study of universal evolution and global history, as well as the analysis and forecasting of modern processes, especially, in the Middle East and Africa. Recently, he co-edited The 21st Century Singularity and Global Futures: A Big History Perspective (Springer, 2020) and co-authored The Big History of Globalization (Springer, 2019). He is especially interested in detecting (and possible mathematical description) of general patterns of the universal evolution, which appears to be only possible in the Big History perspective. He is also enthusiastic about the Big History’s potential to bring together people from different disciplines and with different perspectives, as well as to transform the education system.

Paul Narguizian

Specializes in biology education and Big History research, alternating between the classroom and various natural history museums and science centers as a Professor of Biological Sciences and Science Education at California State University, Los Angeles (2002 – present). He works at the intersection of science and science communication to make science, specifically biology, more meaningful and exciting for my students and the public. He has developed pedagogical strategies and curricula for educators and for scientists, largely inspired by the work of Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grimm, David Christian, and Fred Spier.

Ma. Rubeth Ronquillo-Hipolito

 Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Holy Angel University in Angeles City, Philippines.  She handles subjects such as Ethics, Logic and Humanities along with Big History 1 and Big History 2.  She has been in the teaching profession for 18 years.  Having served as the School of Arts and Sciences’ Big History Coordinator for AY 2019-2020, she represented the university during the Asian Big History Symposium held at JF. Oberlin University in Tokyo, Japan, November of 2019.   She was one of the presenters in the 5-day conference organized by IBHA (Changing the World: Community, Science and Engagement with Big History) August of 2020. Ms. Hipolito received her Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy at the University of Santo Tomas and pursued her Master of Arts in Teaching to prepare her for a life in the academe.  Currently, she is the Coordinator for Region 3 under the International Organization of Educators and Researchers, Inc. (IOER), a reputable organization for educators and researchers.  In the future, she intends to foster Big History as a unique and life-altering discipline; and a valuable research and academic endeavor.

Afshan Majid

Afshan Majid, an Assistant Professor at the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, holds a Ph.D. in History from Aligarh Muslim University. Her research delves into Medieval Indian Society and Culture, with a focus on a 16th-century text. Her academic interests encompass Big History, Environmental History, and Textual Analysis. Notably, she co-developed India’s first undergraduate Big History course and designed innovative courses such as “The History of Small Things,” exploring objects’ significance in history, and “History and Story: Through the Looking Glass of Fiction,” examining history’s intersection with popular culture. Her pedagogical approach challenges traditional teaching methods, and she sees Big History as a vital tool for pushing the boundaries of learning.

Todd Duncan

Todd Duncan combines a research background in physics & astronomy with experience teaching science concepts to a wide range of audiences. His education includes a Ph.D. in Astronomy & Astrophysics from the University of Chicago and Physics degrees from the University of Illinois and Cambridge University. His core interest is understanding the fundamental nature of reality as best he can, while helping others discover their own ways to explore deep questions. Todd’s publications include Your Cosmic Context: An Introduction to Modern Cosmology (co-authored with Craig Tyler and published by Pearson Education, 2009), and “Meaningful Mystery,” a chapter in Science, Religion, & Deep Time, edited by Gustafson, Rodrique, & Blanks (2022). He teaches at Pacific University in Oregon.

Aidan Wong

Aidan Wong, a graduating Ph.D. candidate at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, specializes in interdisciplinary learning and sustainability education. His research focuses on integrating Big History into sustainability education, with presentations at international conferences. Alongside his university role, he collaborates with the Hong Kong Academy for Gifted Education to teach Big History and Sustainability to gifted secondary students. Aidan has authored journal papers, news articles, and two course handbooks: “Big History: A Scientific Origin Story” (2019) and “Introduction to Sustainability for the 21st Century” (2020), in partnership with the Hong Kong Scholars. Recognized as a local pioneer in advancing Big History, he seeks to strengthen connections among local Big Historians and foster collaboration between local, regional, and global Big History initiatives.

Hirofumi Katayama

Hirofumi Katayama is a Professor of Environmental Economics and the Director of the Oberlin Big History Movement (OBHM) at J.F. Oberlin University in Tokyo. He introduced the first formal Big History course in Japan in 2016, covering 13.8 billion years of history and inaugurated the Big History Seminar. In 2019, he organized the inaugural International Big History Symposium in Japan. His commitment to advancing Big History continued with the establishment of the interdisciplinary Big History Collegium in 2020. Katayama’s research centers on challenging anthropocentrism in mainstream Big History, proposing an alternative perspective known as Buddhist Big History.

Staff

Donna Tew | Office Coordinator

Donna Tew has been the IBHA Office Coordinator since 2014.  She manages the data base for the IBHA membership and organizes the bi-annual conferences.  Donna owns a travel business and has extensive experience in office management, including budgets, schedules, travel arrangements, and computer programs.  Prior to 2014 she had been an Administrative Assistant of 32 years for a high school in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Heathe Kyle Yeakley | IT Director

Heathe Kyle Yeakley was born and raised in Oklahoma, where he discovered paleontology on an elementary school field trip in the early 1980’s. It fascinated him to think that Earth had existed for so long that entire ecosystems populated with strange and wonderous creatures had come into being, existed for millions of years, collapsed, and, with their demise, laid the foundation for the cycle to repeat.

In college, he pursued technology as a profession but kept paleontology as a primary hobby. In 2000, he began to volunteer and the then-brand-new Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. Over three years, he accrued hundreds of hours of volunteer work interpreting ancient life exhibits for the public while working full-time and working towards a technology degree.

Today Heathe holds degrees in telecommunications and network management. He is a senior Linux DevOps Engineer and provides technology services to financial companies operating on the American East Coast.

When not looking for ways to apply his technology skills to explore deep time, he can be found watching courses by the Teaching Company and playing with his dogs.

Emeritus Board Members

David Christian

David Christian (D.Phil. Oxford, 1974) is a Professor Emeritus of Macquarie University in Sydney, after retiring at the end of 2020.  He taught for many years in the Department of Modern History, and has also taught at San Diego State University, and Ewha University in Seoul.  For many years, he taught and researched in Russian and Soviet history, and his textbook histories of modern Russia, Power and Privilege and Imperial and Soviet Russia have been widely used in schools and Universities.  He has also published a two-volume history of Inner Eurasia for the Blackwell History of the World.  Since the 1990s he has also taught world history and courses in big history, which cover the entire history of the Universe.  In 2004 he published Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History.  With the support of Bill Gates, he helped create a free online big history course for High School Students, called the “Big History Project”.  His 2011 TED talk, “A History of the Universe in 18 minutes” has been viewed more than 10 million times. In 2013, with Cynthia Brown and Craig Benjamin, he published the first University text on big history.  He has recently published Origin Story: A Big History of Everything and is currently working on a big history of the future and future thinking.

Barry Rodrigue

Barry Rodrigue (Ph.D. Université Laval 1999) is a geographer, archaeologist and folklorist, serving as Full Professor of Anthropology and Scholar-in-Residence at Symbiosis International University, Pune, Maharashtra (India). He began his career as an ethnographer and field biologist in Alaska, where he studied natural / cultural landscapes among Indigenous communities. A Fulbright Scholar, he worked as a research geographer at Université Laval (Québec) and associate professor of humanities at the University of Southern Maine (USA). His strategy of integrating local, regional and global inquiry into a unified context made him an early advocate of universal studies. This was not surprising, since he was a student of astrophysicist G. Siegfried Kutter, a developer of Cosmic Evolution and Big History. A founder of the International Big History Association (2010) and the Asian Big History Association (2014), Barry also served as their international coordinator. He was editor-in-chief of the three-volume collection, From Big Bang to Galactic Civilizations: A Big History Anthology, for which he assembled articles by 100 scholars from 25 nations with big-historians Andrey Korotayev and Leonid Grinin. Barry’s present work focuses on global human adaptation, and he is assembling a deep-time study of Southeast Asia’s agriculture and the climate crisis with Earth-scientists Shamshuddin bin Jusop and Firdaus bin Anuar. Barry is a strong proponent of engaged scholarship, where researchers work with grassroot communities around the world to resolve problems through shared ideas and networks.