Laurie Butler

Butler is a co-author of the 8th edition of the textbook Principles of Modern Chemistry (Cengage, 2016) with David W. Oxtoby and H. P. Gillis.

Butler won a Sloan Research Fellowship in 1992. She was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2002. In 2011 she became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science "for distinguished contributions to the field of physical chemistry, particularly for elegant experimental studies of chemical reaction dynamics of radical and molecular species", and in the same year she also became a Fellow of the American Chemical Society. In 2018 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

She went to the University of California, Berkeley for her doctoral studies, working there with Yuan T. Lee on photodissociation. After completing her Ph.D. in 1985, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1987.

She started her undergraduate education at Johns Hopkins University, intending to study molecular biology or neuroscience. After discovering the large number of animal sacrifices needed for experiments in those areas, she shifted her interests to chemistry, and after a year she transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She completed her bachelor's degree at MIT in 1981.

Laurie Jeanne Butler (born 1959) is an American physical chemist known for her experimental work testing the Born–Oppenheimer approximation on separability of nuclear and electron motions. She is a professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Chicago.