Safi R. Bahcall

Safi R. Bahcall (born 1968) is an American technologist, business executive, and author. His book Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries will be released by St. Martin’s Press in the spring of 2019.^[1] A “loonshot” refers to a widely dismissed idea or project that leads to an important breakthrough.

Raised in Princeton, NJ, Bahcall is the son of the late physicist John Bahcall and astrophysicist Neta Bahcall. Bahcall received his B.A. summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1988 in physics. He received a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University in 1995, where he worked with Leonard Susskind and Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin, and was a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow in physics at University of California, Berkeley from 1995 to 1997. In 1998, Bahcall joined McKinsey & Company, where he advised investment banks and pharmaceutical companies on strategy, technology, and operations.

Bahcall co-founded Synta Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company developing new drugs for cancer, with Lan Bo Chen in 2001 and served as its CEO for 13 years.

In 2008, Bahcall was named Ernst & Young New England Biotechnology/Pharmaceutical Entrepreneur of the Year,^[2] and in 2010, he and his work were featured in a Malcolm Gladwell profile in The New Yorker magazine.^[3][4] In 2011, he served on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) working group on the future of US science and technology research.

Bahcall has presented at approximately 130 banking conferences, investor events, and medical meetings around the world, as well as at leading academic institutions including Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, Princeton University, UC Berkeley, California Institute of Technology, Cornell University, Bell Labs, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, Rockefeller Center, and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

See also

• Loonshot

References