Both of his parents worked as sharecroppers, and Shaw grew up on Hopson Plantation near Clarksdale, where he attended primary school in a three-room schoolhouse.
After completing his undergraduate studies, he moved to Hanover, New Hampshire, to work as a lab technician for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
[1] His thesis, published in October 1969, was titled "Nuclear relaxation in ferromagnetic cobalt," and his doctoral advisor was Alan M. Portis.
[5] After completing his doctoral studies, Shaw began work as a research scientist at Bell Labs in Morristown, New Jersey, in an experimental group led by C. Kumar N. Patel.
The far-infrared free electron laser was operational at Rutgers by 1999 and was used to study the time dependence of the vibrational motion of DNA and other biological molecules.