Clay Shields was born in Washington, D.C, and spent much of his childhood living overseas. Clay earned an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia, and after a short time working on Capitol Hill, joined the U.S. Army. As an infantry officer with the 101st Airborne Division, he served overseas with the peace-keeping force in the Sinai Peninsula, later leaving the Army to return to graduate school. He received his graduate degrees from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and for his dissertation he studied computer networking, particularly multicast routing and network security issues. Clay taught at Purdue for two years, and is now an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Georgetown University, where he studies issues in network security, particularly means of providing individual privacy, methods of locating the source of network attacks, and security in wireless networks.