Cosmologist, NASA advisor, host of the podcast Ask a Spaceman (USA)

Сosmologist, award-winning science communicator, NASA external advisor, and U.S. Cultural Ambassador. He is currently an associate research scientist at Johns Hopkins University and Visiting Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. Paul earned his PhD in physics in 2011 at the University of Illinois. He then spent three years as a research fellow at the Paris Institute for Astrophysics followed by two years at the Trieste Observatory in Italy. Prior to his current appointment, he held a joint position as the chief scientist at the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio and as a cosmological researcher at the Ohio State University.

Paul is the author of three books (“Your Place in the Universe”, “How to Die in Space”, and “Rescuing Science”) and his commentary and analysis also appears in The New York Times, Scientific American, Ars Technica, Nautilus, Undark, Popular Mechanics, and more.

• Paul loves scuba diving, and has dived with great white sharks.

• He has travelled to almost 70 countries, including a visit to Kharkiv in 2020.

• Part of his family comes from eastern Slovakia/western Ukraine. He still makes homemade pierogi/varenyky from his baba’s recipe.

• When Paul was a kid, he had no idea that he would become a scientist. Paul only made the decision halfway through college.