Paul Bartsch (14 August 1871 Tuntschendorf, Silesia – 24 April 1960 McLean, Virginia) was an American malacologist and carcinologist.

He soon took an interest in nature, first by keeping a small menagerie at home, and during his high school years, collecting birds and preparing skins.

Among Bartsch′s professors at the university were the geologist Samuel Calvin, the botanists Thomas H. Macbride and Bohumil Shimek, and the zoologist Charles C. Nutting.

[3] In 1896 Bartsch was invited by William H. Dall to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., to serve as his assistant in the Division of Mollusks.

In 1914 Bartsch became curator at the National Museum of Natural History of the combined divisions of Mollusks and Marine Invertebrates.

[6] At first Bartsch′s works as an assistant of W. H. Dall consisted in cataloguing, together with Charles T. Simpson, the exhibit collection of the Smithsonian Institution.

In 1905 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, with a dissertation based on the Pyramidellidae of the west coast of the United States.

On 9 October 1907, Bartsch left from San Francisco, California, aboard the United States Bureau of Fisheries steamer USFS Albatros to take part in a cruise in the waters of the Philippine Islands and the China Seas on an expedition to collect specimens of marine and non-marine snails.

[7] Bartsch left the expedition at Hong Kong after ten months and traveled home via Europe, arriving in Washington, D.C., in October 1908.

In 1915 Bartsch published, after five years of preparation, his study of South African marine mollusks, initiated by the donation by William H. Turton of his collection in 1906.

In May 1912 Bartsch was invited on an expedition to the Bahamas aboard the Carnegie Institution of Washington motor vessel Anton Dohrn.

This made a lasting impression on Bartsch and led to his later expeditions to the Greater and Lesser Antilles, resulting in several publications on West Indian land snails.

Between 1923 and 1939 Bartsch published several papers on intermediate snail hosts of the Asiatic blood fluke Schistosoma japonicum.

In October 1932 Eldridge R. Johnson equipped and offered for use his yacht Caroline to the Smithsonian Institution in what was to be known as the Johnson-Smithsonian Deep-Sea Expedition to the Puerto Rico Trench.

[8] The expedition included investigators from several disciplines and government agencies and institutions interested in oceanographic work.