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R. Paul Butler is an astronomer who searches for extrasolar planets.
He received a BA and an MS from San Francisco State University, completing a Master's thesis with Geoffrey Marcy, and then completed his doctoral studies at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1993. His graduate work focused on the design of the very sensitive spectrograph required to detect extrasolar planets by detecting variations in the radial velocity of their parent stars. Since 1999 he has been a staff scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science.
In 2001 Butler and Marcy were awarded the Henry Draper Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. He was named Discover Magazine's "Space Scientist of the Year" in 2003.
As a high school student in 1977, Dr. Butler learned techniques of orbit calculation when he attended the Summer Science Program.
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