Professor David Black studied chemistry for BSc and MSc at the University of Sydney. He was awarded an Overseas Scholarship of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 to undertake a PhD in Cambridge with Lord Todd. After post-doctoral research at Columbia University, he was appointed to a lectureship at Monash University. In 1983 he moved to the Chair of Organic Chemistry at the University of New South Wales. He has spent periods of study leave at the ETH Zürich, Würzburg University as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow and Cambridge University. He has also held Visiting Professorships in Tokyo, Auckland, Göttingen, Innsbruck and Kobe. He has won the Rennie, Smith, Birch and Leighton Medals of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, of which he served as National President in 1998. David Black has also contributed to international science as Secretary General of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry from 2004-2011, and Secretary General of the International Council for Science from 2011-2018. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and an Officer of the Order of Australia. He was recently awarded the 2017 Craig Medal of the Australian Academy of Science. Professor Black is recognised as one of the world's leading heterocyclic chemists and has made major contributions to organic chemistry. His research has focused on the deliberate design and synthesis of new molecular structural types, and the discovery of new reactions.