John Alfred Valentine Butler (14 February 1899 – 16 July 1977) was an English physical chemist best known for his contributions to the development of electrode kinetics (Butler–Volmer equation).
Butler's next appointment was in 1926 as Lecturer in Chemistry in the University of Edinburgh, under Sir James Walker, where he studied the behaviour of electrolytes in mixed solvents, on which he published a series of papers in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (A) with five different collaborators from 1929 to 1933.
In 1939 he was appointed to work at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, Princeton and so at the end of August the family sailed on the Queen Mary to New York.
But he did not find the conditions "at all congenial", and so he secured an appointment in 1946 at the Courtauld Institute of Biochemistry under Professor (later Sir) Charles Dodds, where he worked on the proteolytic degradation of insulin.
From 1949 to 1977 the Butler's lived in Rickmansworth in a house then known as Nightingale Corner, which had previously belonged to Hubert J. Foss, first Musical Editor (1923–1941) for Oxford University Press.
[1] His candidacy citation read: "Dr. Butler's main activities have been firstly in thermodynamics and in electrochemistry and secondly the application of physical chemistry to biologically important substances and their reactions.