Dr Shiels career has spanned both industry and academia and has involved 25 years developing a fundamental understanding of biological ageing. He was among the first internationally to clone and analyse telomeres and developed one of the first rat genomic mapping panels to enable the positional cloning of the AGU gene in a bio-ageing mutant (Craig NJ, Duran Alonso MB, Hawker KL, Shiels P, et al (2001) Nat Neuroscience.4:1061-1062). Subsequently, at PPL Therapeutics, Roslin, he helped develop the internationally recognised Xenotransplantation programme and undertook the analysis of senescence in cloned animals (including Dolly the sheep - Shiels PG et al Nature 399:316-317).