Safi Bahcall

Safi Bahcall is a second-generation physicist, a biotech entrepreneur, and former public-company CEO. After working as a consultant for McKinsey, he co-founded Synta Pharmaceuticals, a biotecnology company specialized in developing new drugs to treat cancer and chronic inflammatory diseases. Bahcall led Synta's IPO and served as its CEO for 13 years.

Bahcall advises CEOs and leadership teams on strategy and innovation, and has delivered keynote presentations at industry conferences, investor events, leadership retreats, medical meetings, and leading academic institutions around the world. In 2008, he was named E&Y New England Biotechnology Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2011, he worked with President Obama’s council of science advisors (PCAST) on the future of national research.

"Loonshots," Bahcall’s first book, has been translated into 18 languages and recommended by Bill Gates, three Nobel laureates, Adam Grant, Malcolm Gladwell, and Tim Ferriss; and selected as a best business book of the year by Amazon, Bloomberg, Financial Times, Forbes, Inc., Newsweek, Strategy + Business, Tech Crunch, and the Washington Post. It was the #1 most recommended book of the year in Bloomberg’s annual survey of CEOs and entrepreneurs.

Bahcall received his BA summa cum laude from Harvard and his PhD in physics from Stanford, where he worked with Lenny Susskind in particle physics and the Nobel laureate Bob Laughlin in condensed matter physics. He was a Miller Fellow in physics at UC Berkeley. He lives with his wife, two children, and roughly 37 Gerald + Piggie books in Cambridge, MA.