Stephen Buchwald was born in 1955 in Bloomington, Indiana. He received his Sc.B. degree in 1977 from Brown University where he worked with Kathlyn A. Parker and David E. Cane 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 then was a Myron A. Bantrell postdoctoral fellow at Caltech with Professor Robert H. Grubbs where he studied titanocene methylenes as reagents in organic synthesis and the mechanism of Ziegler-Natta polymerization.

In 1984 he began as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at MIT where he has remained for the entirety of his career. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1989 and to Professor in 1993 and was named the Camille Dreyfus Professor in 1997. 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 has also been the recipient of the Bristol-Myers Squibb Distinguished Achievement Award and the CAS Science Spotlight Award, both received in 2005. In addition, he was given the American Chemical Society's Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry and the Siegfried Medal Award in Chemical Methods which Impact Process Chemistry, both which were presented in 2006.

In 2000, Professor Buchwald was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2008 he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the co-author of over 320 published or accepted papers and 39 issued patents. He also serves as a consultant to a number of companies.

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