[2] Her ideas have revolutionized understanding of bacterial genetic networks and helped researchers to develop novel drugs to fight antibiotic resistance and emerging infectious diseases.

[5] Shapiro enrolled in Brooklyn College with a double major in Fine Arts and Biology and the intention of becoming a medical illustrator.

[8] In fall 1962 Shapiro was hired as a lab technician by J. Thomas August and Jerard Hurwitz in the department of microbiology at the New York University (NYU) school of medicine.

Shapiro also attended summer courses at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) on Long Island.

[11][12] Shapiro has published reflections on her early days in Brooklyn and on her life in science in the Journal of Biological Chemistry[13] and in the Annual Review of Genetics.

[14][6] In 1983,[15] she was named to the Lola and Saul Kramer Endowed Chair in Molecular Biology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, NYC.

'[9]After six months as a postdoctoral student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Shapiro was asked to join the faculty and establish her own lab.

Asked what she most wanted to work on, Shapiro decided that she was fascinated by how a one-dimensional genetic code, DNA, could be translated into three-dimensional organisms.

"[24] She selected a single-celled organism, Caulobacter crescentus, and began attempting to identify the specific biological processes controlling the cell's cycle.

[25] By the late 1990s, Shapiro and graduate student Michael Laub were able to study the genetic basis of cell cycle progression and consequently the identification of three regulatory proteins, DnaA, GcrA, and CtrA, which controlled complex temporal and spatial behaviors affecting large numbers of genes.

Shapiro and Christine Jacobs-Wagner as well as Janine Maddock showed that signaling phosphokinases also had specific positions at the cell poles.

In 2004, using time-lapse microscopy and fluorescent tags, Shapiro demonstrated that chromosomal regions are duplicated in both an orderly and a location-specific manner, involving "a much higher degree of spatial organization than previously thought".

[28] In 2002, Shapiro founded Anacor Pharmaceuticals with physicist and developmental biologist Harley McAdams and chemist Stephen Benkovic of Pennsylvania State University.

[3] They have developed a novel class of small molecules involving a Boron atom, and produced one of two new antifungal agents to be created in the last 25 years.,[5] approved by the FDA as a treatment for toe nail fungus, Kerydin.

In 2015, Shapiro, Benkovic, Fink and Schimmel founded Boragen, LLC to use the boron containing library for crop protection.

Shapiro emphasizes the importance of understanding the complexity of living systems, and the need to be aware that interventions may have unexpected consequences.