Raphaël Butté was born in Paris, France, in 1973. He received the PhD degree from the University Claude Bernard, Lyon, France, in 2000 for his research on the structural and optoelectronic properties of hydrogenated nanostructured silicon thin films with potential applications for photovoltaics and thin film transistors.

He then moved to the University of Sheffield (2000-2003), UK, to work as postdoctoral research associate in the group of Prof. Maurice S. Skolnick (Fellow of the Royal Society).
His research shifted to the optical properties of III-V semiconductors with a main focus on the nonlinear optical properties of cavity polaritons occurring in GaAs-based microcavities driven under resonant optical excitation.

In 2004, he moved to Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) as scientific collaborator in charge of optical spectroscopy at LASPE (http://laspe.epfl.ch/), a newly established laboratory directed by Prof. Nicolas Grandjean.
In 2010, he became permanent member of staff (Scientific Collaborator and Lecturer). He was promoted to the position of Senior Scientist in 2016.
His current research activity deals with planar waveguides, microdisks and photonic crystals made from III-nitride semiconductors. In particular, he is leading the activity focusing on: (i) the physics of exciton-polaritons in planar waveguides and (ii) high-β photonic crystal nanolasers.

He is the author of 119 scientific articles published in peer-reviewed international journals, 14 publications published in peer reviewed journals following an international conference (Web of Science > 4500 citations, h-index: 36; Google Scholar > 6200 citations, h-index: 42) and 6 book chapters.

He has given 30 invited talks in International Conferences/Winter-Summer Schools/Workshops.
He has been the Publications Chair/Guest Editor of the Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Nitride semiconductors (IWN2008) and also served as Scientific Secretary of IWN2008 and of the 5th International Conference on Spontaneous Coherence in Excitonic Systems (ICSCE5).

In 2012, he was one of the 149 scientists recognized by the Outstanding Referee program (http://publish.aps.org/OutstandingReferees) of the American Physical Society (APS) selected from a pool of roughly 60,000 currently active referees.

Since September 2019, he is an Editorial Board Member of the newly launched open access APS journal, Physical Review Research.

From September 2013 until December 2017, he was one of the Editors of the journal "Superlattices and Microstructures" (Elsevier).

Since September 2015 he is a member of the Physics Doctoral School Teaching Committee. He was also a member of the EPFL Teaching Conference from September 2015 until August 2017.