Ian Hewson is an Australian American biological oceanographer and marine ecologist who is a professor of microbiology at Cornell University.

[citation needed] He moved to the University of Southern California for his doctoral research, where he worked on marine environmental biology.

He then moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz to work on nitrogen fixing marine bacteria.

[3] His research makes use of field surveys, laboratory analysis and computational simulation to understand marine mass mortalities.

He has studied sea star wasting disease (SSWD),[5] a condition that impacted starfish from Alaska to Baja California.