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 the identical twin sister of Lynne Butler, now a professor of mathematics at Haverford College; they were the youngest of six siblings, and grew up in Garden City, New York.
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).
[5] Butler's husband Michael Stein is the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor in Statistics at the University of Chicago.
[1] 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.