 From 1961 onwards he was affiliated with Stanford University School of Medicine, where he was founding chairman of the Department of Neurobiology (1975-1987).Shooter attended the University of Cambridge, earning bachelor's (1945) and doctoral (1949) degrees in chemistry.After a brief postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, and having made some notable discoveries about the genetics of haemoglobin while a lecturer at University College London, he moved to the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford as a research fellow in 1961.