Meet The Team: Dr. Paul Ayres

For most, childhood curiosities fade with time and rarely develop into a career. For Paul Ayres, that curiosity became a sustained passion that shaped his professional path. “I got involved in the fire service from a very young age. I remember doing a middle school science fair project on the reaction times of different types of smoke alarms, trying to understand which is more effective,” said Paul who joined Brookes Bell’s team in Houston in 2025.

At age 14, Paul became a junior firefighter with Dallas Fire-Rescue, one of the busiest fire departments in the United States. At that stage, he intended to build a long-term career as a firefighter. But it was a moment during a college internship with a fire marshal’s office that piqued his interest in fire investigations and ultimately led him down the road to an extensive and impressive career in fire and explosion forensics.

“As an intern, I had the opportunity to assist on a case involving people setting fires and filing fraudulent insurance claims across multiple states,” Paul recalls. “Working alongside agencies like the Texas Rangers, the FBI, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) showed me how deep and complex these investigations can be, and I realized I wanted to pursue this as a full time career.”

Since then, Paul has spent more than 16 years providing emergency services in Texas, from being a part of the Dallas Fire Department as both a firefighter and a paramedic, to leadership roles as a county fire marshal and a commissioner of an emergency services district.

As a part of becoming an arson investigator, he also qualified as a police officer. His tenure as a Sergeant at the Investigations Division of the State Fire Marshal’s Office of Texas exposed Paul to big and complex fire cases, including fatal fires, fuel-gas explosions, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), firefighter fatalities and many more, all of which served as key learning opportunities. In total, Paul has investigated more than 700 fire and explosion incidents in his career.

During this time, he also earned his PhD in Forensic Science, with an emphasis in Fire and Explosion Investigations, from Oklahoma State University. He then also became a lecturer at the University of North Texas, as well as an instructor for the Forensic Fire Death Investigation course at Texas State University. Since 2020, he has also served as an instructor in the Fire Executive Management Training (FEMT) program at Sam Houston State University.

Paul’s experience spans a broad range of fire and explosion environments, including structures, vehicles, marine vessels, wildland fires, and commercial and industrial settings. “While working at the State Fire Marshal’s Office, I investigated incidents ranging from hospital explosions to large marina fires that resulted in the loss of 18 motor yachts,” Paul explains.

That breadth of experience directly translates to his work at Brookes Bell, where he applies a consistent forensic approach to maritime and energy-sector fire and explosion incidents at a larger and more complex scale.

“Working at Brookes Bell places you within a specialized niche of fire and explosion investigation,” he says. “The cases often involve complex systems, international operations, numerous stakeholders, and high-consequence losses. They require detailed analysis, including the use of computer fire modeling and a deep understanding of fire and explosion science to evaluate how incidents unfold.”

Since joining last year, Paul has investigated fires and explosions involving bulk cargo, containers, batteries, engine rooms, and pipelines. With fires and explosions remaining at the top of the list for large loss casualties, he strongly believes his unique academic and professional background as a Forensic Fire and Explosion Investigator means he is ideally suited to support Brookes Bell’s clients around the world.

“The work that I do is a mixture of materials science, physics, and chemistry, and I rely upon those scientific disciplines to answer important questions for our clients. It is a line of work that I find fascinating and one that I remain very passionate about, ever since my internship” he noted.