Ernest Charles Large OBE (24 June 1902, Parsons Green, London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham – 25 August 1976) was an English engineer, novelist, mycologist, and phytopathologist, known as a pioneer of phytopathometry.

In 1936, Boots Pure Drug Company Ltd purchased the Colloidal Products Section and, after working for a time as a consultant for his new employer, Large became unemployed.

In 1940 Jonathan Cape published Large's The Advance of the Fungi, a history of phytopathology, which was much esteemed by phytopathologists, as well as general readers.

Over the next two decades, he gained an international reputation for this research on potato blight, photopathometry, and quantitative modelling of the effectiveness of the spraying of crops with fungicidal chemicals.

Large found that time-based plots of the progression of potato blight, in terms of the percentage of plants destroyed, generally have a sigmoid, or S-based, form.

This type of Verhulst logistic growth curve was previously used by S. B. Fracker to describe infection of American forests by the rust fungus Cronartium ribicola.

Assisted by the Agricultural Branch of the Meteorological Office, he developed effective methods of making regional forecasts in England and Wales for the dates during which potato blight outbreaks are likely to occur.

At Harpenden, Large also did research in phytopathometry for choke (Epichloeh typhina) in cocksfoot seed crops, eelworm damage in clover, Verticillium wilt in alfalfa, and common scab (Streptomyces species) in potatoes.

E. C. Large's daughter, Joanna Major, recalled her father's concern about verisimilitude when writing about new discoveries such as Stone Age kindling of fire.

Her father and his family unsuccessfully experimented in making a fire without matches and then visited the Science Museum in London to learn how Stone Age people accomplished the task.