Butler was born in Ireland. He received his bachelor's degree in computer science from
Trinity College Dublin in 1988. He then took an
MSc (1989) and
DPhil (1992) at the
Programming Research Group of the
University of Oxford, working in the area of
communicating sequential processes. He then worked for
Broadcom in
Dublin and at
Åbo Akademi University in
Turku, Finland with
Ralph-Johan Back on
refinement calculus. He joined the University of Southampton in 1995 as a lecturer, rising to reader in 2000 and then professor in the same year. He led the Dependable Systems & Software Engineering group at the
School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton (inactive as of 2022). His main research is in the area of the
B-Method (originated by J.-R. Abrial), especially tool support such as ProB (advanced model checking for B which allows for the simulation of Event-B machines in the Rodin/Eclipse platform), U2B (
UML and B), csp2B (CSP and B), and the RODIN toolset for
Event-B. ==References==