Provost Kavita Bala
The provost works to maintain and enhance the university’s excellence in teaching, scholarship, and outreach, and is responsible for strategic planning and budgeting, tenure and promotion, academic and research initiatives, and general academic supervision of the Ithaca campus.
The provost acts as the university’s chief academic officer and chief budget officer and serves as the president’s first deputy officer. The provost oversees all academic programs and units of the university, other than those reporting to the provost for medical affairs.
In carrying out these responsibilities, the provost works directly with the deans of the colleges, schools, and faculties and with the vice provosts as well as other members of the provost’s executive staff.
About Provost Bala
Kavita Bala, computer scientist, entrepreneur, and professor, became the 17th provost of Cornell University on January 1, 2025.
Bala previously served as the inaugural dean of the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, for which she helped to secure the naming gift, after being named dean of the Faculty for Computing and Information Science in 2020. In her role as dean, Bala led the school through a time of rapid growth. She significantly expanded the faculty in a highly competitive market, to meet student demand and to fulfill the school’s mission to benefit society. Under her leadership, Cornell Bowers CIS secured funding for a new 135,000-square-foot building, set to open in 2025, which will provide space for new labs, experiential student learning, and continued faculty growth. She also established the Bowers CIS Undergraduate Research Experience (BURE) program to expand access to summer research opportunities. Through her leadership, Bowers CIS will become a degree-granting college in December 2025.
As the lead dean of the Cornell AI Initiative, Bala worked toward the creation of minors in AI and AI in Society (to launch in 2025), as well as the establishment of the New York Presbyterian–Cornell Cardiovascular AI Initiative and the Schmidt AI in Science postdoctoral program. Bala was also co-chair of a cross-campus task force convened to develop guidelines for generative AI usage in Cornell classes.
Prior to her dean appointment, Bala was chair of Cornell’s Department of Computer Science. As chair, Bala expanded the department’s presence in robotics and artificial intelligence, and she increased opportunities for undergraduate research and entrepreneurship and support for a diverse community of students and faculty.
Bala’s research expertise is in computer vision, artificial intelligence, and computer graphics, and she has made fundamental contributions to these fields, including the recognition of materials, styles, and other object attributes in images, as well as the modeling of complex materials. Her work using crowdsourced training data has been influential; she pioneered work on style recognition using deep learning — technology that powered a successful visual search AI startup that Bala co-founded.
In recognition of her fundamental contributions to computer science and leadership in AI, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in April 2025. In addition to numerous teaching awards, she received the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award (2020) and the IIT Bombay Distinguished Alumnus Award (2021). She is an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow (2019) and a Fellow of the SIGGRAPH Academy (2020).
Bala received a B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.