after earning his phd in 1940, he accepted a postdoctoral fellowship, and later a teaching position at yale. during his four years at yale, bullock worked at the marine biological laboratory (mbl) at woods hole during the summers. here he taught invertebrate zoology and their famous physiology course, and he studied nerve nets in coelenterates and the structure and physiology of giant nerve fibers in annelids. his studies on nerve nets lead him to be one of the first experimentalists to understand the value and importance of computational techniques for modeling and data analysis.