Paul Julienne earned a bachelor of science from Wofford College and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 1969 to 1973, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the National Bureau of Standards. The following year, he was a research scientist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. In 1974, he joined NIST, becoming a Fellow in 2003. In 2007, he joined the Joint Quantum Institute of NIST and the University of Maryland where his now Emeritus Fellow and Adjunct Professor of Physics.

In 2015, he received OSA’s William F. Meggers Award “for seminal contributions to precision photoassociation and magnetic-Feshbach spectroscopy of ultracold atoms, and the application of these techniques to the formation of cold polar molecules.”