Shannon is a PhD student at Sanquin in Leiden. She obtained her Bachelor's degree in Psychology and her Master's in Methodology and Statistics at Utrecht University. Her PhD project focuses on the development of methods and tools for the (privacy-preserving) exchange, analysis, and publication of anonymised patient data.

She is supervised by Mart Janssen (Sanquin), Rolf Groenwold (Leiden University Medical Center), and Matthijs van Leeuwen (Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science).