After school Stanley moved and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he got his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry. Afterwards, he enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, where he has reached his M.D. Degree.

Later he moved to the west coast and completed an internship in medicine at the University of California in San Francisco. Being a successful young doctor, he decided not to stop and later joined the National Institutes of Health. There in the laboratory of Earl Stadtman, Stanley studied glutaminases in E. coli. After three hard years there he moved back to San Francisco, where at the University of California, he completed a residency in neurology. Then, Stanley stays there and was hired to the faculty of the University’s neurology department in the 1974.

For many years he held different positions in Berkley University of California as well as his alma mater University of California in San Francisco. Now he is the director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at University of California, San Francisco. He built an amazing career, thanks to his discovering prions, which is a class of infectious self-reproducing pathogens.

He began his prion research many years ago, in the early 70s, along with his team of scientists including D. P. Stites, W. J. Hadlow, D. E. Garfin and C. W. Eklund. Along with his colleagues he made an explanation for the cause of bovine spongiform encephalopathy and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, which is a terrible human equivalent. Currently, he continues his work with Alzheimer's disease and tauopathies as well as on prion disease. In the 1992 he was chosen to the National Academy of Science.

He reached a lot of awards and was honored by The Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute in the 1998. He got The Richard Lounsbery Award in the 1993 for his extraordinary scientific research in both Biology and Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the same year he reached Dickson Prize. The main his important achievement is The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he got in the 1997. Previously, he also got a Keio International Award for Medical Science. Recently, Stanley Prusiner was honored by The National Medal of Science. According to Google scholar, he made a great influence on science.

He is a married man. He is a lovely husband of his wife Sandy Turk Prusiner. They are blessed with two children. So he is not much popular in social networking sites due to his low profile. There is no information about his net worth.