Dr. Paul Zehner obtained a Master of Engineering degree in fluid mechanics from Institut National Polytechnique (INP) École Nationale Supérieure d’Électronique, d’Électrotechnique, d’Informatique, d’Hydraulique et des Télécommunications (ENSEEIHT) in France in 2012.

He received a Ph. D. in science from Arts et Métiers ParisTech while working at Office National d’Études et de Recherches Aérospatiales (ONERA) in 2018. The thesis was about the aeroacoustic study of the orthogonal blade/vortex interaction, which was conduced by numerical means.

He was an invited researcher at Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) from 2019 to 2023 and worked on the GPU acceleration of the FaSTAR unstructured Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solver using OpenACC. He also worked on the integration testing and on the continuous integration of the aforementioned code.

He joined CEA in 2023 as a research engineer at Maison de la Simulation, and was involved in the CExA project. He contributed to the development of Kokkos, animated Kokkos trainings, managed the Kokkos CI at CEA, and developed small libraries for CExA demonstrators.

He became a permanent research engineer at CEA DES in 2025, and has been working since then on TRUST, Tripoli 5, and the CExA project. His interests are fluid mechanics, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), algorithms, High Performance Computing (HPC), Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), continuous integration (CI), code quality, packaging, and software engineering.