At the time of his death, he was a professor emeritus of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

He enrolled in a graduate program at Clark University (1959), where he earned his PhD with a thesis on visual masking and metacontrast,[3] before accepting an invitation by Hans-Lukas Teuber to work at the MIT Department of Psychology (1962) for his post-doctoral research.

He trained more than 50 doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows, among them Larry Squire, Michael Stryker, Max Cynader, John H. R. Maunsell, Anya Hurlbert, and Nikos Logothetis.

[6] Continuous funding from By recording from the oculomotor neurons in the superior colliculi and frontal eye fields of the alert rhesus monkey as well as performing lesion and electrical stimulation experiments on these areas, Schiller identified and characterized two parallel neural pathways involved in the generation of visually-guided saccadic eye movements.

[8] Using ablation experiments, Schiller further showed that a lesion of the superior colliculus eliminates express saccades, those occurring at latencies of less than 100 ms.[9] It is believed that the posterior channel, the visual cortex via the superior colliculus, mediates express saccades, while the anterior channel that includes the frontal eye fields is important for target selection.

By administering 2-amino-4-phosphono-butyrate (APB) to the eye, he was able to inactivate the ON-retinal pathway reversibly and demonstrate that the On- and Off-pathways remain segregated from the retina to the striate cortex.

[13] With Karl Zipser and Victor Lamme, he found that stimulus context that falls far outside of the classical receptive field can modulate the response to the center.