Sir Malcolm McRae Burns KBE (19 March 1910 – 17 October 1986) was a New Zealand agricultural scientist, university lecturer and administrator.

[1][2] He won a doctoral scholarship to the United Kingdom, and completed a PhD, supervised by Albert William Borthwick and William Gammie Ogg, at the University of Aberdeen in 1934; the title of his thesis was A study of soil conditions and vegetation in certain selected areas of northeast Scotland with a view to their economic development.

[1][3] He then spent two years as a research fellow at Cornell University in upstate New York under the auspices of a Commonwealth Fund fellowship, during which time he met and married Ruth Alvina Waugh.

[4] Returning to New Zealand, Burns spent a short period as a plant physiologist at the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, before joining Canterbury Agricultural College in 1937 as a lecturer.

Burns retired from Lincoln in 1974, and his legacy is that he gave it its strong research focus, which has gained international recognition.