Dr. Seble Wagaw was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and moved to Ann Arbor with her family in 1974. She carried out her undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan, where she majored in chemistry, and conducted undergraduate research under the supervision of Prof. Will Pearson. Following the completion of her BS Chemistry degree in 1994, she moved to MIT as a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. She carried out her graduate research in the lab of Prof. Stephen L. Buchwald, where she did pioneering work on the development of palladium-catalyzed aryl carbon-nitrogen bond forming reactions. The transformations she invented are now widely used in both academic and industrial labs across the world, and the papers she published during her graduate studies have been collectively cited over 3100 times. She received her Ph.D. from MIT in 1999, and then began her independent career in Abbott Laboratories’ Global Pharmaceutical Research and Development Division. She has remained at Abbott (now Abbvie) since 1999, and is currently Director of Pharmaceutical Development.












Seble Wagaw (Abbvie)