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.

Dr. Lauterbur was a professor along with his wife Joan at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for 22 years until his death in Urbana. He never stopped working with undergraduates on research, and he served as a professor of chemistry, with appointments in bioengineering, biophysics and computational biology at the Center for Advanced Study.