[3][4] Shatz received a tenured position in the basic sciences at Stanford Medical School and later returned to Harvard to head the university's Department of Neurobiology.

In 1976, she received a PhD in neurobiology from Harvard Medical School, where she studied with the Nobel laureates David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel.

In 1992, she moved her laboratory to the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 1994.

She found that the spontaneous activity of neurons in utero is critical for the formation of precise and orderly neural connections in the central nervous system.

"[12][13] In her September 1992 Scientific American article, she wrote, "Segregation to form the columns in the visual cortex [...] proceeds when the two nerves are stimulated asynchronously.