Kavita Bala

Kavita Bala is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and professor who became the provost of Cornell University in 2025. Her 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.

Bala previously served as the inaugural dean of Cornell's 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 significantly expanded the faculty and established the Bowers CIS Undergraduate Research Experience (BURE) program to expand access to summer research opportunities.

As the lead dean of the Cornell AI Initiative, Bala worked toward the creation of minors in AI and AI in Society, 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.

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.