Robin Allshire is a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh who has made seminal contributions to our understanding of chromosome structure and function. |He discovered that mammalian telomeres comprise short tandem repeat sequence motifs and showed that somatic human telomere length decreases with age. He exploited his discovery of gene silencing at centromeres in fission yeast to identify components important for heterochromatin integrity. Professor Allshire is established as a world leader in the study of how the chromatin segregation machinery works. His findings regarding the function of heterochromatin and centromere assembly are important to our understanding of human biology and disease.|