Alison Butler is a

Distinguished Professor Distinguished Professor is an academic title given to some top tenured professors in a university, school, or department. Some distinguished professors may have endowed chairs. In the United States Often specific to one institution, titles such ...

in the Department of

Chemistry Chemistry is the science, scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a natural science that covers the Chemical element, elements that make up matter to the chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules and ions ...

and

Biochemistry Biochemistry or biological chemistry is the study of chemical processes within and relating to living organisms. A sub-discipline of both chemistry and biology, biochemistry may be divided into three fields: structural biology, enzymology and ...

at the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduate ...

. She works on

bioinorganic chemistry Bioinorganic chemistry is a field that examines the role of metals in biology. Bioinorganic chemistry includes the study of both natural phenomena such as the behavior of metalloproteins as well as artificially introduced metals, including those t ...

and metallobiochemistry. She is a Fellow of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific respons ...

(1997), the

American Chemical Society The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a scientific society based in the United States that supports scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Founded in 1876 at New York University, the ACS currently has more than 155,000 members at all d ...

(2012), the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

(2019), and the

Royal Society of Chemistry The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is a learned society (professional association) in the United Kingdom with the goal of "advancing the chemistry, chemical sciences". It was formed in 1980 from the amalgamation of the Chemical Society, the Ro ...

(2019). She was elected a member of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

in 2022.

Education

Butler studied at

Reed College Reed College is a private liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus in the Eastmoreland neighborhood, with Tudor-Gothic style architecture, and a forested canyon nature preserve at ...

, graduating in 1977. She started in immunology, but moved into chemistry to work with transition metals. She worked with Professor Tom Dunne on ''An intramolecular electron transfer study: the reduction of pyrazinepentaaminecobalt (III) by chromium (II)''. She earned her PhD at

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...

in 1982 under Robert G. Linck and Teddy G. Traylor.

Career

Butler worked as a postdoctoral fellow at

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

with Joan S. Valentine and at

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

with

Harry B. Gray Harry Barkus Gray (born November 14, 1935) is the Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry at California Institute of Technology. Career Gray received his B.S. in chemistry from Western Kentucky University in 1957. He began his work in inorgan ...

. She was appointed to the faculty at

in 1986. Here she was awarded an

American Cancer Society The American Cancer Society (ACS) is a nationwide voluntary health organization dedicated to eliminating cancer. Established in 1913, the society is organized into six geographical regions of both medical and lay volunteers operating in more than ...

Junior Faculty Research Award. She was awarded the 34th

Harold J Plous Award. She looks to discover new siderophores, small molecules that bind iron in microorganisms. She uses genomics and

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...

to predict new siderophore structures. She explores how siderophores adhere to mica and look at how they can promote surface colonisation. She identified that siderophores become sticky when wet, which may help to develop underwater adhesives. Her current research considers the uptake of microbial iron, vanadium haloperoxidases in microbial quorum sensing and cryptic halogenation, bio-inspired wet adhesion using catechol compounds, and the oxidative disassembly of lignin. Her research into the bioinorganic chemistry of iron is funded by the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

and

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

. She studies how transition metal ions are used by marine organisms. In 2012, she became the President of the Society for Biological Inorganic Chemistry, and served until 2014. She was made a Fellow of the

in July 2012. She delivered the 2016 Douglas Eveleigh Endowed Lecture at the

Waksman Institute of Microbiology The Waksman Institute of Microbiology is a research facility on the Busch Campus of Rutgers University. It is named after Selman Waksman, a student and then faculty member at Rutgers who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1952 for research which l ...

. In 2018, she was awarded the

Alfred Bader Award for her work on siderophores. In 2019, she was elected to the

, received the American Chemical Society's Arthur C. Cope Scholar award for excellence in

organic chemistry Organic chemistry is a subdiscipline within chemistry involving the scientific study of the structure, properties, and reactions of organic compounds and organic materials, i.e., matter in its various forms that contain carbon atoms.Clayden, J.; ...

, and received the

's Inorganic Mechanisms Award. Butler also received the 2019-2020 Faculty Research Lecturer Award, the highest honor that University of California, Santa Barbara faculty can bestow on their members.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Butler, Alison Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American women chemists Reed College alumni University of California, San Diego alumni University of California, Santa Barbara faculty Inorganic chemists Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows of the American Chemical Society 21st-century American women Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences