Paul Christian Lauterbur (May 6, 1929 – March 27, 2007) was an American chemist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2003 with Peter Mansfield for his work which made the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) possible.

He never stopped working with undergraduates on research, and he served as a professor of chemistry, with appointments in bioengineering, biophysics, the College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign and computational biology at the Center for Advanced Study.

He then went to work at the Mellon Institute laboratories of the Dow Corning Corporation, with a 2-year break to serve at the Army Chemical Center in Edgewood, Maryland.

As a visiting faculty in chemistry at Stanford University during the 1969–1970 academic year, he undertook NMR-related research with the help of local businesses Syntex and Varian Associates.

The Nobel Prize in Physics in 1952, which went to Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell, was for the development of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), the scientific principle behind MRI.

Lauterbur used the idea of Robert Gabillard (developed in his doctoral thesis, 1952) of introducing gradients in the magnetic field which allows for determining the origin of the radio waves emitted from the nuclei of the object of study.

[4] While Lauterbur conducted his work at Stony Brook, the best NMR machine on campus belonged to the chemistry department; he had to visit it at night to use it for experimentation and would carefully change the settings so that they would return to those of the chemists' as he left.

The New York Times published an editorial saying that while scientists credit Damadian for holding an early patent in MRI technology, Lauterbur and Mansfield expanded upon Herman Carr's technique in order to produce first 2D and then 3D MR images.

University of Illinois Chancellor Richard Herman said, "Paul's influence is felt around the world every day, every time an MRI saves the life of a daughter or a son, a mother or a father.