His PhD was obtained from the University of New England in Armidale, under the supervision of Professor Harold F. Heatwole, and dealt with the field ecology of Australian venomous snakes.

He returned to Australia to take up a postdoctoral position at the University of Sydney (with Professor Charles L. Birch and Dr. Gordon C. Grigg) in 1978, and was appointed to a lectureship at that institution in 1980.

His initial studies were based mostly in Australia, and mostly with venomous snakes, but he later conducted research on the behavioural ecology of snakes in several parts of the world, notably on red-sided gartersnakes Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis in Canada, vipers Vipera berus in Sweden and France, island pit vipers Gloydius shedaoensis in China, seasnakes Laticauda and Emydocephalus annulatus in the Pacific islands, and reticulated pythons Python reticulatus in Indonesia.

He also dissected thousands of preserved snakes in museum collections to document basic natural history patterns of hundreds of species from Australia, the Pacific, and southern Africa.

The new explanation relied upon spatial sorting of traits that affected dispersal rates of toads, with only the fastest-moving individuals being able to stay near the increasingly rapidly moving invasion front.

Within the first year of its use by community groups, this method is thought to have removed more than a million cane toad tadpoles from natural waterbodies.

By consuming newly-laid eggs, the “Peter Pan” (non-metamorphosing) cannibalistic tadpoles may offer a long-running block to further cane toad breeding within the waterbody.

Although initially greeted with scepticism, field studies validated its effectiveness [4] and the method is now being widely applied in northwestern Australia.

[16] In 2012 Shine was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Ecological Society of America, and the same organisation presented him with the Robert Whittaker Distinguished Ecologist Award in 2014.

In July 2018 at a scientific meeting in New York, he received the inaugural “Award for Distinguished Service to Herpetology” from the Herpetologists’ League.

Shine was elected to fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019, and a festschrift (symposium) to honour his career was held at the World Congress of Herpetology in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 2020.

A newly identified species of venomous Australian snake, Shine's whipsnake (Demansia shinei),[17] was named in his honour in 2007.