Paul Resnick was born in New York and attended the University of Michigan for his undergraduate studies.

He received a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1992 in Computer Science.

[3] He received the 2010 ACM Software Systems Award for his work on the GroupLens Collaborative Filtering Recommender System[4] which showed how distributed users could personalize recommendations via ratings.

He also received the ACM Special Interest Group on E-commerce Test of Time Award for the paper titled "The Social Cost of Cheap Pseudonyms".

[5] He received the 2016 University of Michigan Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award.