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Cornell Names Kavita Bala Dean of Computing and Information Science

Cornell Names Kavita Bala Dean of Computing and Information Science

Kavita Bala, professor and chair of computer science, has been named dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science (CIS) at Cornell University. Bala will assume her new post Aug. 15. She succeeds Jon Kleinberg, the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science, who has served as interim dean of CIS since August 2019. 

The Cornell Chronicle says Bala is “an expert in computer graphics and computer vision,” and has served as chair of the Department of Computer Science since 2018.

Bala told the university paper that her goals as dean include fostering interdisciplinary research and educational initiatives; deepening connections between the Ithaca campus and Cornell Tech; and broadening participation in CIS. 

“This is a time of unprecedented challenges that have disproportionately impacted people of color,” Bala said. “I’m keenly aware of our responsibility to address inequities within our fields and beyond, while also educating the next generation of Cornell students to be agents of positive change.”

Kavita Bala co-founded the startup GrokStyle, which drew Ikea as a client and was acquired by Facebook in 2019.

In her research, Bala specializes in computer vision and computer graphics, leading research in visual recognition, physically based rendering, and material modeling and perception.

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She co-founded the startup GrokStyle, which drew Ikea as a client and was acquired by Facebook in 2019. Her work on scalable rendering technology has been adopted in industrial products for virtual design and prototyping. Her work on 3D mandalas was featured at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City in 2008.

She is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), was the recipient of the 2020 ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award and has served as editor-in-chief of the journal Transactions on Graphics. She is the recipient of Cornell Engineering’s Fiona Li and Donald Li Excellence in Teaching Award (2015) and James and Mary Tien Excellence in Teaching Award (2006 and 2009).

Bala has a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, India, and received her master’s and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She joined Cornell as a postdoctoral researcher in the program of computer graphics in 1999 and became an assistant professor of computer science in 2002.

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