BRIAN KINGHORN

Brian Kinghorn was born and raised in the Glasgow area. After a year as a veterinary representative, he left Scotland in 1975, eventually working as a deckhand on a cargo ship that landed him in Southern Africa. After two years in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe he and Conny came to hitch-hike round Australia, falling in love with the place.

After obtaining his PhD from Edinburgh under Alan Robertson and a Dr. Agric degree from Norway under Professor Harald Skjervold, he joined NSW Agriculture in the early 1980s at Trangie and made immediate contributions to automated data collection. Through close collaboration with NSW Agriculture colleagues, he developed an appreciation of the Merino industry, which underpinned contributions over the next decade, including an insightful paper on exploitation of line and strain differences in Merinos to the 1986 Leura Conference on Merino Improvement Programs. Following his move to the University of New England, he played a pivotal role in the initiation of MerinoTech, introducing BLUP methods to the Merino industry. Further work with sheep in the 1980s and 1990s included a role in establishment of the Meat Elite program, utilising CT-Scanning and BLUP in Poll Dorset breeding, which was fundamental in establishing across-flock and subsequently across-breed evaluation in meat sheep.

The above successes form one component of Brian's broad interest in the key area of breeding program design. Another area of significant contributions is the simultaneous exploitation of additive and non-additive genetic variance. This has been coupled with great enthusiasm and effectiveness to develop practical ways to collect more comprehensive performance information. These insights and methods have been applied in beef cattle, pigs and aquaculture in Australia and internationally.

In parallel, Brian has maintained three streams of activity that have made major contributions to scientific understanding, training and industry practice:

• He has made significant contributions on methods for detecting and utilising major genes, QTLs and more recently genomic information (in the form of SNPs) in practical breeding programs. This has led to a significant local industry development where the Angus breed in Australia uses GeneProb software developed by Brian and Richard Kerr, in conjunction with DNA tests for detection of unfavourably recessive conditions, with very successful results.
• Brian developed in the second half of the 1990s mate selection methods, which allow simultaneous optimisation of selection and mate allocation, which has been delivered to industry in a commercial form (TGRM). Mate Selection tools are now used on a regular basis in pig, poultry, aquaculture, and species conservation. This approach is one of the most significant application breakthroughs in animal breeding, essentially by making optimising breeding programs for multiple, complex aims and constraints a simple, user-controlled process. While adoption in Australia has grown slowly, initially in meat sheep but spreading to Merinos and beef cattle, the results are spectacular, and moves are underway to extend the reach and accessibility of these tools for the Australian beef industry. More recently, Brian has explored new frontiers in the use of genomic data, including contributions to efficient use of sequence information (genotype imputation), optimising genotyping in breeding populations, and a suite of optimisation applications addressing genetic and production optimisation simultaneously.
• In parallel, Brian has revolutionized the teaching of animal breeding by combining his unique skills in visualisation of concepts, software development, and seeing (and conveying) problems in unique and intuitive ways, with an enthusiasm for innovation for those who seek to learn. He has been an inspiring teacher, supervisor and mentor now to a generation of students and colleagues both in Australia and overseas, and has inspired many to extend their thinking and skills in making complex problems appropriately simple.

Brian has made seminal contributions to the theory, practice and teaching of animal breeding in its broadest sense locally, nationally and internationally. His legacy will be generations of students, teachers, researchers and practitioners who visualize problems, and seek solutions utilizing all available information in elegant and practical ways. His direct impact on beef and sheep breeding programs in Australia has already been significant through Merinotech, Meat Elite, the Beef CRC, and the steadily growing use of TGRM and the next-generation approaches Brian is currently developing, as well as the rapid implementation of smart methods to manage recessive genes. As the more basic elements of effective animal breeding – good performance recording and accurate genetic evaluation – are more and more completely established, the wide range of tools and insights that Brian has developed to make breeding programs “fly” will be more and more widely used.

The Australian livestock industries can be proud to have played a part in Brian's continuing development as an internationally recognised (reflected in numerous invited presentations at World Congresses and other prestigious forums) scientific leader, and to have partnered in obtaining the benefits from the effective breeding programs that his insights have contributed to.

For his outstanding contributions to the science of genetics and animal improvement the Association for the Advancement of Animal Genetics and Breeding is pleased to enroll him as a Fellow of the Society.