My friend and former colleague John Sheehy, who has died aged 76, was an eminent plant physiologist who made significant contributions to understanding the growth and yield of pasture grasses, legumes and the world’s most important staple crop, rice.
Born in Swindon to Bernard Sheehy, a railway worker, and Josephine (nee O’Connor), a nurse, John spent the second world war years on his grandparents’ farm in the west of Ireland. After the war the family moved to Newport, Monmouthshire.
After St Illtyd’s grammar school in Cardiff, John attended Aberystwyth University, gaining a BSc in physics (1965), followed by an MSc in electronics (1967). He joined Prof John Cooper at the Welsh Plant Breeding Station in Aberystwyth, retraining as a plant physiologist and deploying his prodigious quantitative skills to understand plant growth. He was awarded a PhD in 1971.
John then joined the Grassland Research Institute (GRI) in Hurley, Berkshire, as a biomathematician, where he carried out award-winning research on gaseous exchange and functioning of legume nodules. Leaving GRI in 1989 to set up his own consultancy business, Creative Scientific Solutions, he lectured part-time in systems and information analysis at Brunel University.
In 1995, John joined the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines as a crop modeller, establishing the Applied Photosynthesis and Systems Modelling Laboratory. Initially his research supported IRRI’s breeding programme to develop a new plant type and increase rice yield. Having an uncanny ability to go to the heart of complex problems, and dissecting them down to core elements, John concluded that yield could only be increased by “turbocharging” photosynthesis. He conceptualised the anatomical and biochemical changes needed, after comparing rice with maize, and persuaded some of the world’s best scientists to join a global project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
He retired from IRRI in 2009 and returned to the UK to live in Marlow, Buckinghamshire. But the “C4 rice” project (now led by Oxford University) has made considerable progress in reaching his vision.
John was a compassionate and thoughtful leader, inspiring loyalty and respect from all his research groups. He was made OBE in 2012 for services to agricultural research and development, and a fellow of Aberystwyth University in 2014.
He was passionate about rugby union, a lover of wine and a keen golfer until poor health prevented it.
John married Gaynor Bellis in 1971. She survives him, as do his two daughters, Rhiannon and Isabel, six grandchildren and a younger sister and brother.
