Paul earned his Ph.D. in solid-state/materials chemistry at Iowa State University and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University. At North Carolina State University, the Maggard lab applies the tools of synthetic inorganic chemistry to tackle current challenges in physics and energy related research. Current project areas include metastable solids, hybrid oxide/organic compounds, low-dimensional structures and noncentrosymmetric materials, with students having the opportunity to learn new low-temperature synthetic approaches, crystallography, spectroscopy and computational techniques.