In 1954 he obtained PhD degree (Candidate of Sciences) in the area of theory of neutron diffusion.

In 1972—1992 he was appointed as professor at the Department of Quantum Statistics and Field Theory at the MSU Faculty of Physics.

Since 1969 he works at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), and since 1971 also at Moscow State University.

Dmitry Shirkov was the initiator and the editor for a series of monographs «Books in Theoretical Physics» by Nauka (Science) Publishing Company (1978—1990).

He invented and developed the method of quantitative description of elastic and quasi-elastic hadron collisions at low energies (1959—1970).