Paul Ewart graduated with a BSc and PhD in physics from Queen’s University Belfast and moved to the Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College, London where he held a Science and Engineering Research Council Advanced Fellowship before taking up a lectureship at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University where he was Head of Atomic and Laser Physics, 2009-14. He has held a Royal Academy of Engineering 5-year Senior Research Fellowship, and visiting Fellowships at the Joint Institute of Laboratory Astrophysics, Boulder, USA, Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and the University of Otago, New Zealand. After leaving Oxford in 2021 he was Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion in Cambridge before retiring in 2022 and is presently Emeritus Professor of Physics back in Oxford.