Dr. Shapiro attended college at M.I.T. and then was a Morehead Fellow in Medicine at The University of North Carolina School of Medicine. While in medical school, he was the recipient of a Sarnoff Foundation Fellowship and conducted one year of basic science research at the National Institutes of Health.

Following the completion of medical school, Dr. Shapiro served as a medical resident at the Massachusetts General Hospital and subsequently completed fellowships in both infectious diseases and clinical microbiology/immunology at The University of North Carolina Hospitals, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

He returned to Boston, where he was a faculty member at Boston University School of Medicine as both an infectious disease specialist and as the Director of the Clinical Miicrobiology Laboratories at Boston City Hospital and University Hospital until their merger in 1996 to become Boston Medical Center, where he was the Director of the microbiology laboratories for Boston Medical Center. In 2004, Dr. Shapiro moved to Lahey Clinic, where he was, again, the director of the Clinical Microbiology Laboratories and an infectious disease physician.

In 2012 Dr. Shapiro moved to The University of Nevada School of Medicine - Reno where he serves as Chair of Internal Medicine. Dr. Shapiro has over 75 publications, has co-authored three editions of a textbook on microbiology and infectious diseases, served as the editor of ProMED-mail, and is nearing the completion of a single-author textbook on zoonotic infectons.