in 1956 from the College of the Holy Cross and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959, under the supervision of Norman Allan Nelson.
After serving as a research associate at the Upjohn Company from 1959 to 1963, he joined the faculty of Ohio State University (OSU) where he mentored approximately 150 doctoral students, 300 postdoctoral associates, and countless masters students and undergraduates.
He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1984, and was the founding editor of the Electronic Encyclopedia of Reagents for Organic Synthesis (e-EROS).
[6] In 1991, the Ohio State University investigatory panel found that Paquette had plagiarized a NSF proposal, that he was also a reviewer for, and included sections in a paper he published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
The NSF's Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that Paquette knowingly "submitted falsified evidence for the purpose of disproving the misconduct in science charge" and made "false statements under oath in the OIG investigation concerning the authenticity of the evidence".