Butler was fascinated by magnetism as a child. She studied at Reed College, graduating in 1977. Her father was one of the first members of the biology faculty at University of California, San Diego. 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 by chromium . She earned her PhD at University of California, San Diego in 1982 under Robert G. Linck and Teddy G. Traylor. During her graduate studies, Butler read an article about metallo-enzymes in the New Yorker.
Career
Butler worked as a postdoctoral fellow at University of California, Los Angeles with Joan S. Valentine and at California Institute of Technology with Harry B. Gray. She was appointed to the faculty at University of California, Santa Barbara in 1986. Here she was awarded an American Cancer Society Junior Faculty Research Award. She was awarded the 34th University of California, Santa Barbara Harold J Plous Award. She looks to develop new siderophores, small molecules that bind iron in microorganisms. She uses genomics to predict new siderophores, and bioinformatics to discover new siderophores. 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 lingnin. Her research into the bioinorganic chemistry of iron is funded by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. 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 American Chemical Society in July 2012. She delivered the 2016 Douglas Eveleigh Endowed Lecture at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology. In 2018 she was awarded the American Chemical Society Alfred Bader Award for her work on siderophores. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.
