Cliff Shaw was born in 1967 in Northern Ireland. He graduated from Goldsmiths' College, University of London, England with a B.Sc. in Geology in 1988. Cliff moved to Canada in 1989 and studied at the University of Western Ontario with Bob Hodder for an M.Sc. degree (1991) and Alan Edgar for a Ph.D. (1994).

After receiving his Ph.D., Cliff's interests shifted from primarily field-based studies of igneous rocks to experimental mineralogy and petrology, first as a post-doc in Alan Edgar's lab at University of Western Ontario and later as a visiting scientist at the Bayerisches Geoinstitut in Bayreuth, Germany. During this period, Cliff's main interests were in the petrology of mantle xenoliths, particularly those from the Eifel region, and in experimental modeling of reaction textures in mantle xenoliths.

In 2001, Cliff took up an Assistant Professor position in the Faculty of Geosciences at the Georg-August Universitaet Goettingen. After a short period there, he moved back to Canada to take up an Assistant Professor position in the Department of Geology at the University of New Brunswick. Cliff is currently working on developing new models of the kinetics of mineral dissolution in simple synthetic silicate melts and applying experimental measurements of mineral - magma interaction rates to studies of the dynamics of natural magmatic systems. Cliff Shaw HomePage