J. Adam Butts, PhD

J. Adam Butts is a Physical Design Lead at D. E. Shaw Research, a computational biochemistry company that builds specialized supercomputers to simulate molecular dynamics for drug discovery. Butts earned his undergraduate degree before completing his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where his fellowship began in 1998. His expertise in computer architecture and physical design—the discipline of translating a chip’s logical description into a physical layout—has been central to his work on the Anton machines, D.E. Shaw Research’s purpose-built supercomputers for molecular dynamics simulation.