Ewen Eric James Kirk was a professor of dentistry at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He was born in Dunedin, Otago on 23 January 1935, the son of Eric and Ann Kirk, both teachers at Maori schools in the Waikato district. Kirk completed his secondary education in Dunedin, at King’s High School, and then spent a year at the University of Otago completing an intermediate year in health sciences before entering the dental school. He graduated in 1957. In 1958 he became an assistant lecturer at the dental school and a junior dental surgeon at Dunedin Hospital. He wrote a masters thesis studying the mouths of people with root canal fillings. In 1960 he moved to London, where he was a demonstrator and lecturer at the Royal Dental Hospital’s school of dentistry. He went on to become a senior lecturer and later head of the crown and bridge division of the Royal Dental Hospital as well as an honorary consultant for the St George’s Hospital group. He gained his fellowship of the Faculty of Dental Surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1966. In 1973 he moved back to Dunedin, where he was appointed as head of the department of conservative dentistry. The department was later reorganised as the department of restorative dentistry and then the department of oral rehabilitation. In 1958 he married Jenny Saunders, a Dunedin Hospital theatre sister. They had three children, Ian, Philip and Fiona, and five grandchildren. Kirk died from cancer on 3 January 2008. He was 72.