Shaw was born in Cologne, West Germany and grew up in Canada. In 2004 she started a BSc in psychology at the Simon Fraser University. She went on to complete a Masters in Psychology and Law at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. In 2009, she returned to Canada and was awarded a PhD at the University of British Columbia. Her doctoral thesis was entitled "Constructing Rich False Memories of Committing Crime". Shaw remained in Canada, a lecturer at the University of Waterloo and the University of British Columbia. In 2013 she became Lecturer in forensic psychology at University of Bedfordshire. She joined London South Bank University as a Senior Lecturer in Criminology in 2015, before becoming an honorary Research Associate at University College London in 2017. Shaw's primary expertise is in false memories and how law enforcement can use "tactics may lead people to recall crimes that never occurred". In one of her studies, she succeeded in getting 70% of the participants to create false memories or beliefs of events from their childhood that never took place, and this study was covered extensively in mainstream media. The validity of this 70% finding has, however, been criticised by colleagues who recoded the data to conclude 26-30% of participants had false memories. Shaw addressed the criticism in a 2018 article in Psychological Science, where she explained that the original coding categorized false beliefs as false memories--in keeping with past research that argued memory and belief are difficult to truly distinguish.
Public engagement
Shaw is a contributor to Scientific American. She gives public lectures on psychology and memory. In 2016 she created a PBSNova documentary, "Memory Hackers". She contributes to podcasts and radio, and her work has been featured on the Discovery Channel and BBC, as well as appearing in Der Spiegel, Russia Today and The Times. In 2016, Random House published her first book "The Memory Illusion", which has since been translated into 14 different languages. In 2017 she gave a TEDx talk, "How False Memories Corrupt Our Identities, Politics and Justice System" at TEDxBergen and "Is Your Memory Just an Illusion?" at TEDxPorto.
Publications
The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory. Random House, 2016,
