Prior to his appointment at Cornell he was a pre-doctoral fellow with the American Heart Association. In 2004 he received his Ph,D. in Mechanobiology at Georgia Institute of Technology and was an NIH post-doctoral fellow at the Medical University of South Carolina. He received the Lillihei Young Investigator Award from the International Society for Heart Valve Disease in 2007 and the Rita Shaffer Young Investigator Award from the Biomedical Engineering Society in 2009. He is the Director of the Cardiovascular Developmental Bioengineering Laboratory at Cornell. Butcher is a Big Think Delphi Fellow.