About Paul Grant

Paul M. Grant was born in Poughkeepsie, NY, on May 9, 1935. He holds a BSEE degree from Clarkson University and the AM and PhD degrees in Physics from Harvard University. His undergraduate and graduate education was underwritten by the IBM Corporation whose employ he entered in 1953 at age 17, beginning what was to become a 40 year career with the company.

Prior to his undergraduate and graduate studies assignments, he worked as a pinsetter in the company's employee country club bowling allies and later in the mail room of the Poughkeepsie Development Laboratory.  He was subsequently promoted to electronics technician and system programmer on Project SAGE, the world’s first

supercomputer and prototype for NORAD and stationed at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

While in college at Clarkson he returned to work summers at IBM on thin magnetic film memory development, silicon epitaxial film growth and laser spectroscopy.  His Harvard PhD thesis addressed the optical properties and band structure of semiconductor thin films.  

Upon completing graduate school, Dr. Grant was posted to the IBM San Jose Research Laboratory where he pursued a variety of basic research studies on the physical properties of magnetic semiconductors, organic and polymer metals, and high temperature superconductors and participated in the initial development of laboratory automation software and systems.  His IBM career also included management and divisional executive staff responsibilities to evaluate IBM’s printer, storage and display technologies.  In addition, he served a two-year sabbatical as IBM Visiting Professor of Materials Science at the National University of Mexico.

In 1993, Dr. Grant retired from IBM to accept a position as Science Fellow at EPRI where he oversaw a variety of exploratory studies on wide bandgap semiconductors and power applications of superconductivity, and served as a consultant to EPRI’s executive management and utility membership on a broad range of energy science issues.  He retired from EPRI in early 2004 to undertake a variety of personal and professional interests.

Dr. Grant has published over 100 papers in scientific peer-reviewed journals, as well as numerous articles on science and energy issues in the popular press and interviews on television which have earned him several awards as a science writer and commentator.  He is a co-inventor on the international base patent for high temperature superconductivity and consults regularly with the US Department of Energy on power applications of superconductivity.  Dr. Grant is a Fellow of the American Physical Society  and has served on the Executive Committees of the Society for Industrial Physics and Education, as well as on the editorial advisory board of The Industrial Physicist.  In 2005, he was appointed a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and a Visiting Scholar in Applied Physics at Stanford University.