Liz Shaw

Liz Shaw, full name Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, was a civilian member of UNIT. She was a companion of the Third Doctor.

Liz was drafted from the University of Cambridge by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart as a scientific advisor to UNIT. Skeptical at first of UNIT's ambit to defend against alien invasion, she changed her mind when she encountered the newly-regenerated Third Doctor and became involved in defeating the plans of the Nestene Consciousness and its animated plastic Autons ("Spearhead from Space").

Liz was an accomplished scientist, an expert on meteorites with degrees in several disciplines, including physics and medicine. Her extensive training, however, still paled in comparison to the Doctor's own knowledge of the universe and scientific principles far beyond that of Earth's.

Liz continued to work with the Doctor and UNIT through encounters with the Silurians, the so-called Ambassadors of Death and the Inferno project. She eventually resigned from UNIT and returned to Cambridge. She reportedly told the Brigadier that all the Doctor really needed was "someone to pass him his test tubes and tell him how brilliant he was," this feeling probably contributing to her decision to return to her own research ("Terror of the Autons").

Uniquely of all the companions, she never actually travelled in the TARDIS during her time as the Doctor's assistant, as her time with the Doctor coincided with his exile to Earth imposed by the Time Lords and the removal of his knowledge of time travel. She did, however, travel in the TARDIS with the Doctor and her successor, Jo Grant, after the Doctor regained his knowledge and freedom and some time after Liz's resignation from UNIT ("The Wages of Sin").

Liz's life after leaving UNIT was spent working with a paranormal investigation organization not unlike UNIT, called the "Preternatural Research Bureau," sometimes referred to as "P.R.O.B.E." Eventually, she returned to working with UNIT.

Liz died in 2003, the victim of an extraterrestrial terraforming virus contracted while she was part of a UNIT team investigating an alien artifact on the Moon ("Eternity Weeps").