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, a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and professor, became the 17th provost of Cornell University on January 1, 2025. She brings a distinguished record of leadership and scholarship to the role. Prior to her appointment, Bala served as the inaugural dean of the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and as chair of the department of Computer Science. Her foundational research in computer vision, computer graphics, and artificial intelligence has been recognized by election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and by induction as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
As dean, Bala secured the naming gift for the Cornell Bowers College, led a significant expansion of faculty to support the college’s rapid growth, and launched construction of a new 135,000-square-foot building designed to house robotics labs, experiential learning spaces, and faculty offices. Her leadership helped position the college as a national leader.
As the lead dean of the Cornell AI Initiative, Bala advanced key academic programs, including the creation of new minors in AI and AI in Society, and helped establish the Schmidt AI in Science postdoctoral program at Cornell. She also co-led a university-wide task force that developed guidelines for the responsible use of generative AI in education and learning.
Bala’s research has made fundamental contributions to image understanding, including the recognition of materials, styles, and object attributes; the modeling of complex materials; and the use of crowdsourced training data. Her groundbreaking work on style recognition using deep learning led to her co-founding a successful visual search AI startup.
In addition to numerous teaching awards, Bala is a recipient of the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, the IIT Bombay Distinguished Alumnus Award, and is a Fellow of the SIGGRAPH Academy.
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.