Author, Entrepreneur, Physicist
Safi Bahcall will be presenting his talk, "Loonshots: Imagining the Impossible" during the General Scientific Session on Monday, September 11, at the 2023 CNS Annual Meeting.
Safi Bahcall is a former public-company CEO, physicist, award-winning entrepreneur, author of the international bestseller "Loonshots", and widely regarded speaker and advisor on innovation and strategy.
"Loonshots: Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries" – which combines physics, business, and history – has been translated into 21 languages and was the #1 most recommended book of the year in Bloomberg’s annual survey of CEOs and entrepreneurs. "Loonshots" was selected as a best business book of the year by Amazon, Bloomberg, Financial Times, Forbes, Inc., Newsweek, Strategy + Business, Tech Crunch, the Washington Post, and many others; and has been recommended by Bill Gates, Daniel Kahneman, Malcolm Gladwell, Tim Ferriss, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and more.
Bahcall received his BA summa cum laude from Harvard, completed his PhD in physics at Stanford, and served for three years as a consultant at McKinsey and Company. In 2001, he founded a biotechnology company developing new drugs for cancer. He led the company's IPO and served as its CEO for 13 years. 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.
In addition to presenting at Fortune 500 companies including Amazon, Google, Goldman Sachs, Johnson + Johnson, Microsoft, Viacom and others, Bahcall has presented to or advised hypergrowth startups, investment funds, the CIA, the US Air Force, and the US Navy, as well as spoken at business schools and science, mathematics, or medical departments at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, UC Berkeley, Caltech, Cornell, Bell Labs, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, the National Institutes of Health, and others.
Bahcall currently works with senior leadership teams on strategy and innovation and with CEOs as an executive coach. His ongoing research includes novel applications of the science of phase transitions to economic and social systems.