Dr Butler completed a PhD synthesising cyclic peptides as supramolecular receptors for anions with CI Professor Kate Jolliffe at the University of Sydney. Following postdoctoral appointments with CI Professor Richard Payne and Professor David Parker FRS (Durham, UK), Dr Butler was awarded a Ramsay Memorial Fellowship at Durham University to develop molecular receptors for the detection of ATP. He began a Lectureship at Loughborough University in 2016, where his current position is Reader in Chemistry. He leads a group synthesising lanthanide-based molecular probes for the purpose of sensing biological anions, studying protein interactions and monitoring enzyme activities in real-time. He was awarded the Thieme Chemistry Journals Award in 2021 for his work in chemical synthesis of supramolecular probes.

Dr Butler is developing lanthanide-based molecular tags for site-selective labelling of proteins, in collaboration with CI Professor Gottfried Otting (ANU).  He is a named investigator on the CIPPS project “Lanthanide-based chemical probes for protein labelling” and has been providing advice to CIPPS postdoc Dr Leila Hill (Supervisor: Kate Jolliffe).  With Gottfried, he recently developed a method for selective labelling of cysteine residues on proteins based on nucleophilic substitution of an activated 4-nitropyridyl lanthanide complex (Chem. Eur. J., 2021, 27, 13009–13023). This methodology is being used to provide new insight into the elucidation of targeted regions of proteins using NMR spectroscopy (Magn. Reson. 2021, 3, 1–13; Magn. Reson. 2022, 3, 65–76).