Robin Campbell Allshire (born 19 May 1960) is a British academic who is Professor of Chromosome Biology[3] at University of Edinburgh and a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow.

[2] In 1985 Allshire joined Nicholas Hastie's research group at the MRC Human Genetics Unit, Edinburgh (formerly MRC Clinical and Population Cytogentics Unit) as a postdoctoral researcher where he discovered that mammalian telomeres are composed of simple repetitive sequences similar to those of unicellular eukaryotes[10] and that telomere length in blood cells shorten with age and are further eroded in cancerous cells.

[12] In 1989 he took a position as an independent visiting scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) for 18 months before joining the MRC Human Genetics Unit as a junior group leader.

[13] At the MRC HGU, Edinburgh (1990 - 2002), and subsequently at the Wellome Trust Centre for Cell Biology, University of Edinburgh (2002–present), he discovered that genes are silenced when placed within fission yeast centromeres[14][15] and telomeres,[16] and then utilised this gene silencing to gain fundamental insights into the processes of chromosome segregation,[17][18][19] and heterochromatin[20][21][22][23] and kinetochore CENP-A chromatin[24][25][26][27][28][29] establishment[30][31] and maintenance.

[45][46] Recently using fission yeast his team discovered an epigenetic mechanism that allows fungi to develop resistance to antifungal drugs without alterations to their DNA.