Kwabena was born in Ghana, West Africa. He moved to the US in 2004 for his undergraduate studies in Chemistry at Calvin College, MI, graduating with honors in 2008. After a year working at UOP Honeywell in IL where he researched new catalysts for the petrochemical and gas processing industries, he traveled from the Midwest to the East Coast to begin his graduate studies in Inorganic Chemistry with Prof. Daniel Nocera at MIT (and later Harvard University). His graduate research focused on structural and mechanistic studies of water splitting electrocatalysis at cobalt and nickel compounds. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2015 from Harvard University, Kwabena began postdoctoral work in Prof. Philip Kim's group in the Department of Physics at Harvard, where he studied ion intercalation and quantum transport in 2D van der Waals heterostructures. In July 2018, Kwabena joined the faculty of the UC Berkeley Department of Chemistry.