Will Shank was trained in conservation and art history at these institutions:

Villa Schifanoia, Graduate School of Fine Arts of Rosary College, Florence, Italy
The Institute of Fine Arts of New York University
The Harvard University Art Museums

with internships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art and the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution

He worked at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as Conservator, Senior Conservator, and finally, for a decade, as Chief Conservator, between 1985 and 2000.

He was a Fulbright Scholar/Getty Fellow at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1995 and a Getty Fellow at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid in 1995-96.  He was the Booth Family Conservation Fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 2005. 

Mr. Shank is a Fellow of the International Institute for Conservation and the American Institute for Conservation, which granted him the Conservation Advocacy Award in 2010.

He is the co-founder and co-chair of Rescue Public Murals, an initiative of Heritage Preservation in Washington, D.C.  http://www.heritagepreservation.org/RPM/about.html

Will Shank restoring Keith Haring's "Tuttomondo," (1989) in Pisa