After obtaining his PhD in Psychology at the University of California, San Diego, CA, USA, in 1975, he completed two postdocs, one at Institute for Perception, Nederlandse Organisatie voor Toegepast Natuurwetenschappelijk Onderzoek (TNO; English: Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research), Soesterberg, Netherlands, and University of California, Irvine, CA, USA.
After faculty positions at University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA, and Boys Town National Research Hospital (BTNRH), he served as the director of Department of Auditory Implant and Perception Research, House Ear Institute, Los Angeles, CA, USA, with an affiliated research professor position at Biomedical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
[7] Shannon has been one of the earlier and main researchers studying the psychophysics of electrical stimulation in cochlear-implant users,[8][9] laying out the foundations for fundamental limitations and capabilities of sound perception with a cochlear implant.
More specifically, using noiseband vocoding, inherent degradations of cochlear-implant speech signal transmission were (loosely) mimicked by removing most temporal fine structure and limiting envelope information to a small number of spectral channels.
In a later study, Shannon and colleagues provided early evidence that one of the main limiting factors in speech perception by cochlear-implant users is reduced spectral resolution.