Paul Doughty Bartlett was an American chemist. Bartlett was born on August 14, 1907 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. He received his B.A. from Amherst College in 1928. After his graduation from Harvard with James Bryant Conant, Bartlett worked at the Rockefeller Institute and the University of Minnesota. Most of his career was spent at Harvard. Among other achievements, Bartlett was co-author with Lawrence H. Knox of a classic paper on organic reaction mechanisms.  After his retirement in 1972, he started his second career at Texas Christian University.

He obtained the American Chemical Society's Young Chemists Award in 1938. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1947, and he received the A. W. von Hofmann Gold Medal of the German Chemical Society in 1962. He received the National Medal of Science from President Johnson in 1968, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1978. In 1969 he was elected an honorary member of the Chemical Society of London and an honorary member of the Swiss Chemical Society. In 1981 he received the Robert A. Welch Award in chemistry. He received honorary degrees from Amherst and from the Universities of Chicago, Montpellier, Paris, and Munich. He received the James Flack Norris Awards, both in physical-organic chemistry and in teaching, as well as a dozen or so other prizes and awards.