John Colin McEwan grew up on a sheep and beef farm near Tokanui, Southland, New Zealand (NZ), part of the property his great grandfather settled and developed from native bush after emigrating from Islay Scotland. His family also developed a stud that was one of the earliest registered Romney flocks. He received a BSc(Hons) in biochemistry from the University of Otago in 1978. After a year teaching, he joined the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (now AgResearch) as a technician at Woodlands in Southland. In 1985 he transferred to An Foras Taluntais (now Teagasc), Ireland. In 1986, he returned to Invermay, near Dunedin, where he has remained until present, rising through the ranks to the highest science level within AgResearch. John has been a major force behind many initiatives aimed at improving the genetic merit of livestock, particularly sheep, in NZ, Australia and globally.
Sheep Improvement Ltd (SIL) undertakes genetic evaluations for the NZ sheep industry. John's involvements include its establishment in 1999, designing the computational framework, writing much of the code and management. A national across-breed analysis (advanced central evaluation; ACE) was introduced in 2003 and currently involves around 4 million animals. In 2002 John was instrumental along with Neville Jopson in the establishment of the Central Progeny Test to evaluate industry sires and provide across breed linkage to underpin ACE. In the early 1990's, John recruited farmers to record parasite resistance traits, leading to the WormFEC breeding service. John developed a carcass trait genetic evaluation system in 1996 based on the InnerVision CT facility (a joint venture with Landcorp Farming Ltd). For both these services, John initially collected and checked the data, ran the genetic evaluations, and generated client reports. They have now been incorporated into SIL. Perhaps John likes the challenge of difficult-to-measure traits; he is currently turning his attention to feed efficiency and green house gas emissions.
John helped elucidate the Inverdale gene. He helped Landcorp to verify, map (using his own code) and select the 'Carwell' gene affecting L. dorsi area, leading to the LoinMAX test. John also helped to confirm and map a gene for muscling effects, with three Texel breeders, leading to the MyoMAX test. John identified the region for microphthalmia, a recessive defect in NZ Texels resulting in blindness, using only 45 animals. This led the i-Scan test. John's research also identified a region associated with a favourable combination of production traits and parasite resistance, leading to the WormSTAR test. John's efforts in obtaining global co-funding were instrumental in NIH moving cattle to the top of its livestock sequencing priorities. A project sequencing sheep at a comparatively low depth (3x) was able to use cattle as an assembly guide, leading to an ovine 50k SNP chip. John also established and led the highly regarded bioinformatics group for AgResearch at Invermay during 2000-1. Other examples of John turning his hand to computational and analytical tasks include methods such as Peddrift (AAABG 1997), TIPS (AAABG, 2001) and MELD, the latter used for assembling the skim sequence of the sheep genome.
John has still found time and energy to contribute to the wider scientific community through societies, international committees, mentoring and co-supervising graduate and post graduate students from a variety of universities. He has been a member of AAABG since 1990, served as vice president for 1999-2001, and contributed as a reviewer, session chair and author (29 papers). The NZ Society of Animal Production awarded him their McMeekan Memorial Award in 2003. He has 51 refereed journal articles and over 200 other publications.