Professor Steve Buchwald smiles in his office.

Stephen L. Buchwald receives inaugural Akira Suzuki Award

Categories: Awards, Faculty, Research

Annual award recognizes outstanding contributions to research in the discovery of chemical reactions.

Camille Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry, Stephen L. Buchwald, has been named the winner of the 2021 Akira Suzuki Award for remarkable results in the development of chemical reactions within the field of experimental chemistry.

Established in 2021 to celebrate Professor Akira Suzuki’s 90th birthday and to commemorate his 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Akira Suzuki Award recognizes outstanding contributions to research in the discovery of chemical reactions, defined in the broadest sense. The award ceremony will take place as part of the 4th ICReDD International Symposium at Duke University on March 12-13, 2022.

Considered one of the world’s most influential chemists, Buchwald joined the faculty at MIT in 1984 and is now the Associate Head of the Department of Chemistry. He received a bachelor’s degree from Brown University, earned a PhD from Harvard University, and completed postdoctoral work at Caltech with Professor R.H. Grubbs. Buchwald’s career spans over 500 publications and numerous accolades, including ACS awards, an Arthur C. Cope Award, the Ulysses Medal, the Wolf Prize, and the Dr. Karl Wamser Innovation Award, among others. He recently received the 2021 Huang Yaozeng Award in Organometallic Chemistry of the Chinese Chemical Society and the Award for Creativity in Molecular Design and Synthesis from the ACS Northern NJ Organic Topical Group.

Research in the Buchwald group combines elements of organic synthesis, physical organic chemistry, and organometallic chemistry to devise catalytic processes of use in solving problems of fundamental importance.