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 received his B.A. from Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 in 1988 in physics. He received a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

 in 1995 and was a Miller postdoctoral fellow

Miller Research Fellows

The Miller Fellow program is the central program of the Adolph C. and Mary Sprague Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science on the University of California Berkeley campus, which constitutes the support of Research Fellows - a group of the world’s most brilliant young scientists...

 in physics at U.C. Berkeley, 1995-1997. In 1998, Bahcall joined McKinsey & Company

McKinsey & Company

McKinsey & Company, Inc. is a global management consulting firm that focuses on solving issues of concern to senior management. McKinsey serves as an adviser to many businesses, governments, and institutions...

, 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

Ernst & Young

Ernst & Young is one of the largest professional services networks in the world and one of the "Big Four" accountancy firms, along with Deloitte, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers ....

 New England Biotechnology/Pharmaceutical Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2010, he and his work was featured in a Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell, CM is a Canadian journalist, bestselling author, and speaker. He is currently based in New York City and has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996...

 profile in The New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

magazine.