Stephen L. Buchwald was born in 1955 in Bloomington, Indiana. He earned his Sc.B. degree from Brown University in 1977 where he conducted research with Professors Kathlyn A. Parker and David E. Cane at Brown University as well as with Professor Gilbert Stork at Columbia University. He entered Harvard University as a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in 1977 and received his Ph.D. in 1982. His doctoral research work, under the direction of Professor Jeremy R. Knowles, focused on the mechanisms of phosphoryl transfer reactions in chemistry and biochemistry.
Following his Ph.D., he was a Myron A. Bantrell postdoctoral fellow at Caltech working with Professor Robert H. Grubbs on titanocene methylenes as reagents in organic synthesis and the mechanism of Ziegler-Natta polymerization. In 1984 he joined the faculty at MIT as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1989 and to full Professor in 1993, and was named the Camille Dreyfus Professor in 1997. From July 2015-August 2023, he served as Associate Head of the MIT Department of Chemistry.
Over the course of his career, Professor Buchwald has mentored more than 240 postdoctoral researchers, 100 graduate students, and numerous undergraduates and visiting scholors – many of whom have gone on to distinguished careers in academia and industry.
During his tenure at MIT, Professor Buchwald has received numerous honors including the Harold Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award of MIT, an Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, the 2000 Award in Organometallic Chemistry from the American Chemical Society and a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health. He was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000 and to the National Academy of Science in 2008.
Additional honors include the Bristol-Myers Squibb Distinguished Achievement Award and the CAS Science Spotlight Award, (both in 2005), the American Chemical Society’s Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry as well as the Siegfried Medal Award in Chemical Methods which Impact Process Chemistry, (both in 2006), and the Gustavus J. Esselen Award for Chemistry in the Public Interest (2010). He received the Arthur C. Cope Award (2013) the Linus Pauling Medal Award and the Ulysses Medal from University College Dublin (both in 2014), and the BBVA Frontiers in Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences (2014 Award, received in 2015). He was also awarded the William H. Nichols Medal (2016), the Roger Adams Award in organic chemistry (2018), the Wolf Prize in Chemistry (2019), Yamada-Koga Prize (2020, awarded in 2023), Paul Karrer Gold Medal from the University of Zürich (2021), and the Akira Suzuki Award from the ICReDD (2021).
Professor Buchwld is the coauthor of over 550 published or accepted papers and 55 issued patents. He serves as a consultant to a number of companies.
Photo Credit: Justin Knight