Dr. Paul Hursky earned BS and MS degrees in physics from University of Pennsylvania in 1978 and 1980. Paul worked at Lockheed Aeronautical Systems Company 1980-1990 in Burbank, California. In 1990, Paul helped open an office in San Diego for Lockheed, where he also embarked on graduate studies at UCSD, joining the Intelligent Systems, Robotics and Controls group of UCSD's Electrical and Computer Engineering department. Paul's dissertation combined signal processing and wave propagation modeling, and was advised by W. S. Hodgkiss and W. A. Kuperman at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. While at UCSD, Paul joined Science Applications International Corp. in 1999. Paul's group at SAIC, led by Michael Porter, founded a new company, Heat, Light and Sound Research in 2004. Paul left HLS Research in 2017 to found Sonar-synesthetics LLC. Paul joined Applied Ocean Sciences in 2020.

While at Lockheed, Paul worked on advanced processing concepts for S-3/P-3 ASW aircraft, and grew into a group engineer role there, managing a group of 10-20 engineers. At SAIC, Paul shifted his emphasis to more basic research, working on a variety of projects for ONR, including Capturing Uncertainty, Persistent Littoral Undersea Surveillance, Vector Sensor Processing, Model-based Tracking, and Acoustic Communications. At HLS Research, Paul worked on basic research projects for ONR and DARPA, as well as SBIR/STTR projects for the Navy. While at HLS Research, Paul implemented a GPU-based split-step Fourier PE model. Paul also worked with NIWC on embedded processing for autonomous vehicles. At Applied Ocean Sciences, Paul is using compressed sensing to produce better basis sets for updating ocean state to edge platforms with limited communications bandwidth (STTR), exploiting information theory concepts in tomography and geo-acoustic inversion (ONR), and using machine learning to optimize ASW tactics (SBIR).

Paul's research interests include underwater acoustic signal processing, physics-based processing, wave propagation and reverberation modeling, compressive sensing and convex optimization, machine learning, adaptive beamforming, communications processing, marine mammal localization and classification, and GPGPU programming. Paul has decades of experience working on integrating innovative sensors and processing algorithms into sonar processing systems.