Paul Melby is a Lead Engineer at The MITRE Corporation's Center for Advanced Aviation System Development.  He serves as a technical lead for the data and text mining efforts of the Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing (ASIAS) initiative, an industry-wide program to proactively uncover safety risks through data analysis and monitoring.  Prior to his work on ASIAS, he conducted economic and emissions benefits analyses for the implementation of area navigation (RNAV) arrival and departure procedures at major U.S. airports.  Before coming to MITRE, he worked as a Senior Researcher at Qbit, LLC,  where he developed novel image and video compression algorithms.  He conducted postdoctoral research in granular physics and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics at Georgetown University.  He received a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship to conduct research at the Santa Fe Institute and graduated with a B.S. in Physics from Ohio University.