Paul Christian Lauterbur, (born May 6, 1929) is an American chemist who shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2003 with Peter Mansfield for his work which made the development of magnetic resonance imaging possible. His original MRI machine is located at the Chemistry building on the campus of Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York.

Dr. Lauterbur is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and no longer teaches on Long Island.