Paul Richards has been working on Open Source technology since well before the term was coined. He was one of the earliest participants in the FreeBSD project as well as being one of the project's original core team members. He was also an early member of the Apache project. Until 1995 he worked as a reasearch associate at University of Wales, College Cardiff, where he obtained both a MSc in Systems Engineering and a Phd in the applicaton of neural networks to pattern recognition. He now spends much of his time running Originative Solutions Ltd, an IT consultancy company which he founded. With what spare time he has remaining he continues to play an active role in the FreeBSD project.