David Marples is a Distinguished University Professor at the Department of History & Classics, University of Alberta. He specialises in history and contemporary politics of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. Within the Council for Global Cooperation, he is a member of the Board of Governors and is the Chair of Eastern European Studies. 

Marples is the author of sixteen single-authored books and his publications include Understanding Ukraine and Belarus (2020), Ukraine in Conflict (2017), Our Glorious Past: Lukashenka’s Belarus and the Great Patriotic War (2014) and Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine (2008). He has also edited four books on nuclear power and security in the former Soviet Union, contemporary Belarus, and Ukraine. He has published over 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals. 

At the University of Alberta, Marples received the J. Gordin Kaplan Award for Excellence in Research (2003) and the University Cup in 2008. In 2009, he was Visiting Fellow for the Wirth Institute at the Department of Contemporary European History, University of Innsbruck where he taught a course on Ukraine and Belarus as EU Border Countries. In 2013, he was Visiting Fellow at the Slavic and Eurasian Center, Hokkaido University, Japan. He is a former President of The North American Association for Belarusian Studies (2010–15) and was formerly Director of the Stasiuk Program on Contemporary Ukraine at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (2004–14), University of Alberta. 

Marples is regarded as one of the leading Western authorities on the historical and socio-political aspects of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe and Belarusian studies. He received his BA Honours from the University of London in 1975, his MA in History from the University of Alberta in 1980 and a Ph.D. in Economic and Social History from the University of Sheffield in 1985.