Stephen L. Buchwald was born (1955) in Bloomington, Indiana.   He received his Sc.B. degree from Brown University in 1977 where he worked with Kathlyn A. Parker and David E. Cane at Brown University as well as 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 thesis work, with Jeremy R. Knowles, concerned the mechanism of phosphoryl transfer reactions in chemistry and biochemistry.

He received BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences has gone in this seventh edition to U.S. chemist Stephen Buchwald “for the development of catalytic routes based on palladium and copper to construct carbon-nitrogen and carbon-carbon bonds,” an advance with “great impact” on the “efficient synthesis of modern pharmaceuticals and compounds for agricultural use,” in the words of the prize jury.