Paul was appointed Associate Director of EMBL-EBI Services in 2019 with responsibility for data resources and related activities. He has been an EMBL Senior Scientist since 2011 and Team Leader for Vertebrate Genomics at EMBL-EBI since 2007. His team develops the Ensembl genome annotation resources and analysis infrastructure. He joined EMBL-EBI in 2005 to undertake postdoctoral research with Ewan Birney.

Paul has worked on aspects of genome annotation, comparative genomics, and large-scale biological data generation projects for more than two decades, initially with the sequencing of the mouse genome. More recently he has been involved with ENCODE, the 1000 Genomes Project, the International Human Epigenome Consortium, and numerous genome projects.  

Before that, Paul completed MSc degrees in both Biomedical Engineering and Computer Science and a DSc in Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St Louis. Paul graduated from Drake University with a BS in Physics.