Aloke Paul did his schooling at B-zone Boys Multipurpose High School and Bidhan Chandra Institution, Durgapur. His undergraduate studies were at the Regional Engineering College (currently known as the National Institute of Technology) Durgapur from where he earned the degree of BE in metallurgical engineering in 1996 and proceeded to complete his ME from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru in 1998. Subsequently, he had a stint at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore as a research associate which lasted till 1999. In 2001, he moved to the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands for his doctoral studies under the guidance of Frans J.J. van Loo to earn a Ph.D. in 2004. In between, he had a brief stay at Institut für Anorganische Chemie of the University of Vienna, Austria in February 2004. He did his post-doctoral work at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada at their Advanced Materials and Process Engineering Laboratory (AMPEL) during 2004–05 and returned to India in 2005 to take up the position of an assistant professor at his alma mater, Indian Institute of Science. He has been serving IISc ever since, becoming an associate professor in 2010 and a full-time professor in 2016 where he heads the Diffusion in Solids Group. He served the Helsinki University of Technology (presently known as the Aalto University), Finland as a visiting professor in 2008, and the University of Münster, Germany in 2012 as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow.

Aloke Paul is a materials scientist and a professor at the Department of Materials Engineering of the Indian Institute of Science. He is known to work in the field of solid-state diffusion. In 2010, Paul received the Outstanding Young Faculty Award of the Indian chapter of Microsoft Research, and four years later, the Ministry of Steel of the Government of India selected him as the Metallurgist of the Year Award in 2014. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in 2017, the highest Indian science award. In 2020, he was elected as a fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences.

Aloke Paul is known to have made a remarkable contribution to the field of solid-state diffusion. At the Eindhoven University of Technology, he was among the group of scientists who made pathbreaking discovery showing previously unknown phenomena related to the Kirkendall effect leading to finer understanding based on new models, which are included in the textbooks. This helped to develop a physico-chemical approach to correlate microstructure with diffusion analysis.

Recently, his group solved the most important unsolved problem in multicomponent diffusion by estimating meaningful diffusion coefficients following the diffusion couple method, which was a textbook knowledge as impossible during the last 7-8 decades after the developments of equations for estimation of the diffusion coefficients based on the Onasger formalism. They proposed the concept of constrained diffusion paths bypassing the complications and proposed a complete equation scheme following a physics-based method. This is named "Paul's method" in multicomponent diffusion.