[2] Shiltsev was born on March 14, 1965, in Ivanovka, Kirgiz SSR, and spent his early years in Osinniki, Russia.

(Habilitation) in accelerator and beam physics from Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics (Novosibirsk, Russia) in 1994 and 2017, correspondingly, and worked in leading accelerator laboratories in Novosibirsk and Protvino in Russia, the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) Lab in Texas (USA) and DESY before joining Fermilab as a Robert R.Wilson Fellow in 1996.

In 2001 he became the Head of the Tevatron department[4] and one of the leaders of the Collider Run II team of then the world's most powerful accelerator.

His major research accomplishments include the original idea and pioneering development of electron lenses (1997) – now in use for beam-beam compensation, halo collimation, Landau damping and space-charge compensation;[11][12][13][14][15] pioneering ground motion studies, ATL law of ground diffusion and data analysis worldwide;[16][17][18] theory of coherent synchrotron radiation (CSR) effect.

[23] Shiltsev gave many lectures, colloquia and seminars worldwide on the progress and future of modern particle physics, history of particle accelerators, and on Russian polymaths Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-1765)[24] [25] and Dmitry Mendeleev (1834-1907),[26] and wrote dozens of articles in leading peer-reviewed and pop-sci journals, incl.