Shull attended Schenley High School in Pittsburgh, received his BS from Carnegie Institute of Technology and PhD from New York University.

All of these things go back to understanding the basic science behind their operation," Professor Shull, then 79, said on the day of the Nobel announcement.

Professor Shull teamed up with Ernest Wollan, and for the next nine years they explored ways of using the neutrons produced by nuclear reactors to probe the atomic structure of materials.

In Professor Shull's opinion the most important problem he worked on at the time dealt with determining the positions of hydrogen atoms in materials.

In 1993 he received the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' Gregori Aminoff prize for his "development and application of neutron diffraction methods for studies of atomic and magnetic structures of solids."'