Paul Grobstein is the Eleanor A. Bliss Professor of Biology at Bryn Mawr College, whose faculty he jointed in 1986. Prior to that, he spent ten years as a faculty member at the University of Chicago, following post-doctoral fellowships at The Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University. Professor Grobstein is an active research scientist, who has published over fifty articles and book chapters on nervous system development, brain organization and function in relation to behavior, and theoretical biology, the last two being the areas of his current primary research activity. Professor Grobstein's research program has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and several private foundations and donors. Professor Grobstein has also served in a variety of administrative positions, including the chairmanship of the Department of Biology at Bryn Mawr College during the period 1986-1993.

In addition to his basic research work, Professor Grobstein has a long-standing interest in science education. Professor Grobstein encouraged and helped to bring about major changes in the biology curriculum to make it more accessible and attractive to a wider array of students, and contributed as well to the establishment of a new interdepartmental program in Neural and Behavioral Sciences. During the period of his tenure as Chair, the number of biology majors more than doubled. Interest in the sciences generally has also greatly increased, in part because of a large multi-year grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which Professor Grobstein helped to write, and for which he served as scientific coordinator. Professor Grobstein is currently project director for a second multi-year grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Professor Grobstein also helped to write a multi-institutional grant to the Pew Foundation, and served a term as coordinator for the resulting program in neuroscience. Professor Grobstein has also served as consultant and visiting team member for academic programs at several other institutions, and was a member of the Committee on Space Biology and Medicine of the National Research Council's Space Studies Board.

Professor Grobstein's interests extend beyond science education per se to a number of more general considerations having to do with the relationships between science and human welfare broadly conceived , and he has written several popular and semi-popular articles reflecting these interests. Biology, brain research, and science in general, Professor Grobstein feels, are not rarefied and arcane subjects of significance only for specialists, but rather rich bodies of acquired experience and ideas with direct applications in a wide range of human and social contexts. Professor Grobstein believes strongly that both science and human culture generally would be better served by a change in the culture of science which made it more accessible to the population in general. Toward these ends, Professor Grobstein organized and taught a Bryn Mawr Alumnae College course in Neurobiology and Behavior, and has twice organized and taught two week intensive summer workshops in this area for high school teachers. Professor Grobstein has been active in a variety of additional teacher education and minority outreach programs, has been invited to give semi-popular lectures in a variety of forums, and is continually exploring new ways in which the complexities of human existence can both contribute to and be illuminated by scientific explorations.