Shane Martin Coughlan was born in Dublin City, Republic of Ireland and moved to England for higher education. He studied English, Politics, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wolverhampton in the West Midlands. He read for his MA at the University of Birmingham, graduating in 2003 with an MA in International Studies (Globalisation and Governance). His research during his MA was focused on security, and he produced a thesis on cybernetic warfare. You can read it at http://www.shaneland.co.uk/ewar.

Shane has given numerous talks on security and on Free Software issues throughout the UK and Ireland. He has been involved in open standard certification work as a consultant, and is currently involved in researching how human usability guidelines can be applied to security software.

Shane began working full-time at FSFE in October 2006.