Shane was born in Southern Colorado and raised in the town of Durango and the adjacent town of Bayfield, where his family has a working horse ranch. A child of the spare landscape of the southwestern United States, Shane has never forgotten where he came from.

Raised by a single mother who worked to raise three children and put herself through college, Shane and his family moved to the Pacific Northwest as a young adult where he lived until he moved back to the Southwest to attend college in Santa Fe.

Shane entered the workforce during the days of the dot-com boom in the Pacific Northwest and was fortunate to work for many  amazing companies doing high level wireless data training, project management and consulting. Shane has worked on projects for T-Mobile, McKinsey and Company, Wireless Data Services, Palm, Sonera, MTN, Nokia, Orange Switzerland, Orange UK and Microcell. Shane has worked, traveled and lived around the world in places as varied as Morocco, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Greece, India, the Philippines, Comoros and Quebec.

Realizing his passion lay in the field of research Shane decided to return to academia at New York University, where he graduated as a university honors scholar and was then accepted in a top-10 graduate program in international security at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.

As an international relations professional Shane is interested in issues of irredentism, comparative politics, the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P), terrorism and the politics of terrorism, Balkan minority rights and first and third-world security policies. Shane has a particular interest in the politics of nationhood and ethnic identity in the Balkans and Turkey.