Julia Shaw

Julia Shaw was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1987 and grew up in Canada; she has said she moved around a lot from a young age and was always the new person.⁠[1]

After a bachelor’s degree at Simon Fraser University, she went on her supervisor Stephen Hart’s recommendation to study Psychology and Law at Maastricht University.⁠[1]

She received an M.Sc. cum laude from Maastricht and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of British Columbia in 2013.⁠[2]

From 2013 to 2015 she was a lecturer in forensic psychology at the University of Bedfordshire, and from 2015 to 2017 a senior lecturer and course director for criminology at London South Bank University.⁠[2]

With Stephen Porter of UBC she published a study in Psychological Science in which 60 university students had three roughly 40-minute interviews where an interviewer described a fictitious event mixed with true details from their caregivers; of the 30 told they had committed a crime, 21 (71%) were classified as having formed a false memory of it.⁠[3]

In September 2016, as the author of The Memory Illusion, she discussed how misremembering can alter a person’s sense of self; she said memory can be dramatically wrong and can be used in ways that put people in jail.⁠[4]

In 2017 she co-founded Spot, an AI-based platform for reporting workplace misconduct, whose clients have included Monzo, AXA, Kickstarter and the Bar Council.⁠[5]

In January 2018 Kimberley Wade, Maryanne Garry and Kathy Pezdek argued in a Psychological Science commentary that the 2015 study combined false beliefs with false memories; under two other established coding schemes only 26% to 30% of reports met the criteria for false memories, and around 43% met those for false beliefs.⁠[6]

Shaw published a rebuttal saying she had intentionally coded her data differently and that all accepted coding types agree a significant number of participants came to believe they had committed a crime that never happened; she also questioned the use of laypeople to judge false memories. Separately, Nicholas Brown and James Heathers found statistical errors in the paper; she issued a correction, attributing them to imprecise rounding in Excel and missed cells, which did not alter the headline findings.⁠[7]

In February 2018 Spot launched a free web-based AI chatbot that uses cognitive interviewing to guide employees through recording workplace harassment and discrimination, with anonymous reporting and time-stamped PDF reports.⁠[8]

She met her co-founders Dylan Marriott and Daniel Nicolae at the San Francisco AI startup studio All Turtles; she said a chatbot can be completely neutral and non-judgmental and that Spot “acts as a perfect memory interviewer.”⁠[9]

In 2019 she published Making Evil, on why people do bad things; its US edition, Evil, was released on February 26, 2019, and a review said it applies science and rational thought to taboos such as murder and cyberbullying in the hope of inspiring empathy rather than condemnation.⁠[10]

In 2020 she began co-hosting the BBCBBCThe BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) is the United Kingdom’s public broadcaster. Its predecessor was the British Broadcasting Company, formed in 1922, and since 1927 it has been established under a Royal Charter. It provides television, radio, and online services in the UK, is funded mainly by the television licence fee, and broadcasts worldwide in multiple languages through BBC World Service.Open the full entry Sounds true crime podcast Bad People with comedian Sofie Hagen, while an honorary research associate at University College London; she called it “basically a science show under the pretence of true crime.”⁠[11]

In 2022 she published Bi: The Hidden Culture, History and Science of Bisexuality and created the BBC podcast Bi People; she also founded the Bisexual Research Group, which hosts an annual international conference on bi+ research.⁠[12]

Reviewer Thomas York called the book thorough and insightful, covering the etymology of “bisexual,” bisexual history and its socio-political and legal dimensions, with a chapter on bi+ coming-out experiences.⁠[13]

On October 9, 2025, Canongate Books published her Green Crime: Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the PlanetPlanet LabsPlanet Labs (brand name Planet) is a San Francisco-based Earth observation satellite company founded in 2010 by three NASA scientists; it designs, builds and operates a constellation of imaging satellites and provides daily imagery data and analysis of Earth. The company is a public benefit corporation listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker PL.Open the full entry, and How to Stop Them, which uses real-world cases to examine who commits environmental crimes and why.⁠[14]

She appeared on episode 483 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, whose description calls her a criminal psychologist and author; topics included the dark tetrad, serial killers, murder, lies and scams, jealousy and monogamy, sexuality, false memories and environmental crime.⁠[15]

In August 2026 Green Crime was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing; the organisers said she reconstructs the minds of the perpetrators of some of the worst environmental crimes of our time.⁠[16]

As of October 2026 she is a visiting researcher at the King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence, studying how AI systems affect human minds, including persuasion, memory distortion and harmful manipulation.⁠[5]

In the UK she regularly acts as an expert witness in cases where the reliability of witness memory is challenged, and she is an assessor for the Netherlands Register of Court Experts (NRGD), part of the Dutch Ministry of Justice.⁠[17]

She has presented four seasons of the AMC documentary series Killers Caught on Camera, and Murder in Mind, co-hosted with Kerry Danes, won the True Crime Awards Viewer’s Choice Award in 2026.⁠[12]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.drjuliashaw.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[15]

X: Public account: https://x.com/drjuliashaw (opens in a new window)⁠[17]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjuliashaw/ (opens in a new window)⁠[15]

University of Bedfordshire: Official website: https://www.beds.ac.uk/ (opens in a new window)⁠[3]

London South Bank University: Official website: https://www.lsbu.ac.uk/ (opens in a new window)⁠[4]

University College London: Official website: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ (opens in a new window)⁠[11]

King’s College London: Official website: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/ (opens in a new window)⁠[5]