Rowan is the Canada Research Chair of Biodiversity Science at McGill University. He completed his M.Sc. at McGill in 2005, conducting experimental evolution with microbes. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia in 2010, where he studied the genetics of adaptation in threespine stickleback. He then moved to Harvard University as a Howard Alper postdoctoral fellow, where he investigated ecological genomics using deer mice. Since 2013 Rowan has been a professor in the Redpath Museum and Department of Biology at McGill. He is broadly interested in the reciprocal interactions between ecological and evolutionary processes, and the mechanisms by which these forces impact genomic variation in natural populations.