Kavita Bala

Dean, Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, Cornell University

Kavita Bala is the dean of the Bowers College of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University. Cornell Bowers CIS houses the departments of Computer Science, Information Science, and Statistics and Data Science. Bala received her SM and PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Before becoming dean, she served as the chair of the Cornell Computer Science Department.

Bala leads research in computer graphics and computer vision. She co-founded GrokStyle, a visual recognition AI company, which drew IKEA as a client, and was acquired by Facebook in 2019. Bala is the recipient of the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award (2020), and the IIT Bombay Distinguished Alumnus Award (2021). Bala is an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow (2019) and Fellow of the SIGGRAPH Academy (2020). Bala has received multiple Cornell teaching awards (2006, 2009, 2015) as well.