Robert G. Shulman ’43, GSAS’49, Biophysicist and Pioneer of Spectroscopy

Robert G. Shulman ’43, GSAS’49, a biophysicist and key figure in developing nuclear magnetic resonance (MR) techniques in live subjects, died on Jan. 11, 2026. He was 101.

Shulman, a Sterling Professor Emeritus of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale, also made major contributions in defining metabolic pathways and in understanding brain function through spectroscopy.

Shulman was born on March 3, 1924, and raised in the Rockaways in New York. At the College he was a student and mentee of professor and literary critic Lionel Trilling CC 1925, GSAS 1938. “Reading and discussing under his guidance was a miraculous education,” Shulman recalled, according to a 2024 profile in Yale News.

After college, Shulman served in the Navy and then returned to Columbia, earning his Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1949. He worked for many years at Bell Laboratories, where in 1961 he founded and headed the biophysics research department. His work there pioneered the use of MR to study biology, including protein structure and function, and metabolism, as well as the basic biophysical understanding that led to medical MRI contrast agents.

Also in 1961, Shulman received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he used to spend a sabbatical year at Cambridge working with molecular biologist and biophysicist Francis Crick and biologist Sydney Brenner on frame shifts of the genetic code.

In 1979 Shulman joined the Yale faculty. He founded and then directed the Magnetic Resonance Research Center at the Yale School of Medicine, establishing the university as an early leader in magnetic resonance spectroscopy and functional imaging technology. He was also director of the Division of Biological Sciences in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

According to Yale News, Shulman’s collaborations while at the university brought several major insights into the role of metabolism and bioenergetics in medical science, including diabetes, cardiology and neurological disorders. He pioneered the use of MR technology in studying the brain’s activity and demonstrated that it could trace metabolic functioning in the brain — studies that have helped reevaluate how the brain uses energy even while at rest.

He also made fundamental contributions to the basic understanding of metabolism itself, Yale News said, through the discovery of the glycogen shunt and its role in allowing metabolism to adapt to sudden challenges by stabilizing multiple metabolic pathways.

Shulman was one of the first fellows at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center, which was established in 1981 as a hub for research and scholarly exchange. The Shulman Lecture Series, named in his honor, coordinates lectures on topics bridging science and the humanities.

Shulman retired in 2002 but continued to produce research. In 2013 he published Brain Imaging: What it Can (and Cannot) Tell Us About Consciousness. As recently as 2023, he co-authored a paper published in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology. He was an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine.

Shulman is survived by his wife, Stephanie Spangler; sons Mark and James; and three grandchildren. He was predeceased by his first wife, Sara Lee Shulman, and their son, Joel.