Safi R. Bahcall

Who is Safi R. Bahcall?

Safi R. Bahcall is an American technologist and business executive. He is currently President and CEO of Synta Pharmaceuticals Corp., an integrated drug discovery and development organization specializing in cancer drugs.

Raised in Princeton, NJ, Bahcall is the son of the late physicist John Bahcall and astrophysicist Neta Bahcall. Safi Bahcall received his B.A. from Harvard University in 1988 in physics. He received a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University in 1995 and was a Miller postdoctoral fellow in physics at U.C. Berkeley, 1995-1997. In 1998, Bahcall joined McKinsey & Company, where he advised investment banks and pharmaceutical companies on strategy, technology, and operations.

Bahcall co-founded Synta with Lan Bo Chen in 2001. Previously he had founded a drug discovery company that was focused on novel ion channel research; it was absorbed into Synta.

In 2008, Dr. Bahcall was named Ernst & Young New England Biotechnology/Pharmaceutical Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2010, he and his work was featured in a Malcolm Gladwell profile in The New Yorker magazine.