He pursued graduate studies in the department of agricultural chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned his PhD in 1939.
[2] His graduate research with Conrad Elvehjem concerned nicotinic acid as a treatment for canine blacktongue, with implications for human pellagra.
[5][6] Though his career was shorter-lived than expected, subsequent work by others has developed many of Woolley's hypotheses in productive directions.
[7][8][9] One of his assistants, Robert Bruce Merrifield, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1984, for work on peptide synthesis they did together in the 1950s.
Woolley had Diabetes mellitus type 1 from childhood, and in 1923 was among the first children to receive insulin to treat the condition.