Paul L. Schechter is the William A.M. Burden Professor of Astrophysics at MIT. He is an observational astronomer who studies galaxies and clusters of galaxies, and the distribution of dark matter therein. Schechter earned an AB from Cornell in 1968 and a Ph.D. from CalTech in 1974. He served on the faculty at Harvard and the staffs of the Kit Peak National Observatory and the Mt. Wilson and Las Campanas Observatories before coming to MIT in 1988.

For the last several years he has been carrying out ground-based optical and Hubble Space Telescope observations of the mirages produced by extragalactic gravitational potentials. Schechter is MIT director for the Magellan Telescopes, a pair of 6.5-meter telescopes recently completed in Chile by a consortium of five educational institutions. Schechter played a leading role in the design and implementation of the system, which monitors and actively controls the shapes of the telescopes' primary mirrors.