After studying as an undergraduate student at the University of Surrey in the dim and distant past, and obtaining a Masters degree from Lancaster University only slightly more recently, Paul received his PhD – also from Lancaster University – in 2004. His doctoral investigations, pertaining to communication in primary care around depression and suicide risk-assessment, led to a Research Fellowship at Lancaster University’s Institute for Health Research, working on a number of projects around health inequalities, secure services and end-of-life care. A two-year teaching fellowship in the Sociology department at Lancaster followed and, in 2007, Paul moved on to the (then) newly founded University of Cumbria. He's still there now, as an Associate Professor in Social Psychology, based in the Institute of Health. Outside of his ongoing teaching and research responsibilities, he chiefly occupies himself with being the Chair of the UoC Research Ethics Panel.

Paul’s core research interests relate to social interaction across a range of healthcare and allied environments, with a side-line in sport psychology to lighten the mood. He's a West Ham fan in football and a Kent fan in cricket, so some degree of mood-lightening is kind of necessary across the board. Recently he has published on stigmatised diagnoses, mental health, neurodiversity, collective identities, conversation analysis, decision-making, general linguistic philosophy and discursive psychology. Substantively, he is primarily exploring the interpersonal dimensions of clinical practice in the Allied Health Professions, psychotherapy and counselling.