Paul received his B.A. in Geography from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in 2014. During his undergraduate career, he served as an officer in the Geography Club, completing a senior thesis under the supervision of Dr. Sally Horn, and took part in a 10 week summer internship at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. Immediately after graduating he entered the UTK School of Information Science to pursue a Master of Science degree in Information Science. There he served as an officer in the student chapter of the Special Libraries Association and completed a nearly 6 month internship at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Upon receiving his M.S. in 2016, he immediately received a job offer from Earth Resources Technology, a federal government contractor for NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) in Asheville, NC. At NCEI he worked in the Archive Branch in two different positions. First, he was assigned to the NOAA OneStop Project as a Metadata Content Editor where he was responsible for creating new collection metadata and enhancing already existing collection metadata to meet OneStop requirements. He also assessed over a hundred NCEI datasets using the Data Stewardship Maturity Matrix and was instrumental in developing the Data Stewardship Maturity Questionnaire which is an integral component of the Collection Manager suite of metadata tools. Paul transitioned into the Submission Agreement team in June of 2019 where he assisted data providers with archiving their data with NCEI. For a brief period of time he also served as the executive secretary of the Archive Appraisal Committee and served as co-manager of the Archive Branch Document Library. Finally, he managed the Archive Branch Google Site and helped author several new branch guidance documents and updated many existing SOPs. In January 2021, Paul accepted an offer of federal employment at NCEI and moved to the gulf coast of Mississippi to work at the NCEI site housed within the Stennis Space Center. There he continues the important job of data stewardship and works closely with the NOAA OneStop Project, helps ingest and archive data submitted through the Send2NCEI (S2N) application, and is actively assisting NCEI’s cloud migration efforts.

In his free time he enjoys exploring the joys of recent parenthood with his wife Brandy (also a UTK Geography alum) and their 18 month old son, Canon. As the former Vice President of the Blue Ridge Electric Vehicle Club, he enjoys driving and educating others on alternative fuel vehicles, flying kites, walking their 2 dogs Dublin and Reese, and trying exciting new seafood recipes.