Greatness with grace

When you speak with Ohio State’s new president, expect the conversation to go in surprising directions. Tech, science, the arts, philosophy, sports—they’re all likely to pop up. Sometimes, he’ll even blend them together.

Sitting on a couch in his University Square South office, Ravi V. Bellamkonda connects the dots between a couple of ideas. He talks about his daily meditation practice, which he’s been doing since his college days. It grounds him, prepares him for the day and encourages reflection, compassion and gratitude. But he also views mindfulness as a cognitive tool—“a gym for the brain” that could help address our mental health crisis among young people if we were to adopt it more widely. 

“I’d like us to be as intentional about exercising our minds and keeping them in good form as we are about our bodies,” he says.

With his scientific and humanistic sides, Bellamkonda, 58, is difficult to pigeonhole. He’s an accomplished academic, engineer and neuroscientist. He’s founded startups, earned 11 patents and developed a biomedical device to help treat aggressive brain tumors. But when asked what makes Bellamkonda stand out, his admirers often don’t start with titles and accomplishments. They start with something else: his generous spirit. 

“It’s really how you treat people that’s most impressive,” Kendall Buchan ’23 DDS, the then graduate student member of the Ohio State Board of Trustees, told Bellamkonda just before he was appointed the university’s 18th president in March.

Dualities are part of Bellamkonda’s identity. He’s analytical and empathetic, driven and considerate, inspirational and practical. John Horack, the university’s vice president of research, calls him a “grounded dreamer.”

“He’s unflappable,” says his wife, Lalita Kaligotla, sitting next to him on the office couch. That poise is a trademark, whether he’s pushing for change, answering questions from reporters or reassuring a loved one trying to control an exuberant pet. “It’s OK,” he tells Kaligotla when their goldendoodle, C.J., who’s visiting campus for a magazine photoshoot, knocks over a glass of water in the presidential suite.

“I’m the boring guy,” Bellamkonda says with a smile, contrasting himself with his wife.

“He’s the calm, steady one,” she corrects.

But don’t mistake calm for coldness. When friends and colleagues describe Bellamkonda, they frequently use the same word: “kind.” In fact, Kaligotla discovered this character trait even before meeting him.

On a tight budget as a Brown University grad student in 1989, Bellamkonda came up with an affordable alternative to making costly overseas phone calls home to India. He used a boom box to record himself on cassette tapes and mailed them to his younger sister in Hyderabad, the south-central Indian city where she attended college. Kaligotla, a college friend of his sister’s, heard some of these audio letters and came away impressed. 

“The first thought that occurred to me was: ‘What a nice thing to do. What a considerate gesture.’” 

Five years later, they were married.

Bellamkonda has big ambitions for Ohio State. It can be an athletics powerhouse and an academic force. It can be enormous and still personal. It can relentlessly pursue excellence and do so with compassion. The university doesn’t need to choose between these dualities. After all, he never has.

The right kind of ready

Many expected Bellamkonda to become a university president one day, just not so soon. After more than a year as Ohio State’s provost, trustees appointed him to the top job following the resignation of his predecessor, Walter “Ted” Carter Jr., in early March.

Bellamkonda’s hiring occurred six days after Carter’s resignation. While some have criticized the speedy process, University Senate Secretary Jared Gardner defends the decision. He says it avoided a risky period of interim leadership during a challenging time for higher education. Plus, it ensured Ohio State kept Bellamkonda, who likely would have been targeted for recruitment by rival institutions during a prolonged transition. 

“It was quite clear that Ravi was meant to be a university president,” says Gardner, the Joseph V. Denney Designated Professor of English. “So why not here?”

Leaders across campus and beyond echo those sentiments. “Ravi’s combination of experiences, values, commitment to excellence in higher education are exactly what we need at Ohio State right now,” says Trevor Brown, the longtime dean of the John Glenn College of Public Affairs whom Bellamkonda appointed to a two-year term as interim provost in March.

Indeed, Bellamkonda’s supporters reel off an impressive list of attributes: A remarkable track record as a researcher and higher ed leader. A deep understanding of what a university is meant to be. An ability to navigate complexity with imagination and discipline. A willingness to take prudent risks at a moment of global and societal uncertainty. 

“He’s very thoughtful, very creative and innovative,” says Columbus civic and business leader Steve Steinour, CEO of Huntington Bank. “He sees challenges not as obstacles, but as opportunities to move the university—and the community—forward.”

“He’s incredibly curious,” adds Dr. John J. Warner, chief executive officer of The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and executive vice president at Ohio State. 

On the first day of his presidency, Bellamkonda’s style is on display. At Longaberger Alumni House, he moves easily through the crowd of well-wishers, a big smile on his face. He hugs colleagues, poses for photos, makes time to talk with Buckeyes of all stripes. 

After Ryan Day introduces him at his first presidential press conference, Bellamkonda shakes the coach’s hand and makes an announcement. “It’s Ryan’s birthday,” he tells the room, beaming. Bellamkonda then turns to Day, pats him on the shoulder and says with quiet sincerity, “Thank you for coming. Thank you for everything you do.”

In his remarks to trustees, Bellamkonda takes a big swing. With about 24 hours to prepare, he wrote the speech himself, working on it right until the last minute. In fact, his big inspiration didn’t hit until the morning just before the meeting while walking his dog. At that point, he told Ohio State Alumni Magazine later, he decided to frame his speech around a defining idea: citizenship.

Bellamkonda begins his remarks by reflecting on the extraordinary range of people who’ve welcomed him to Ohio State over the past 400-plus days: faculty, students, trustees, staff, elected officials, alumni, civic leaders and more. What ties these individuals together? Citizenship, both the individual experience of belonging and the responsibility to the broader community. 

And if university leaders can ignite Ohio State’s unique citizen force, he says, the effect is monumental. Students are inspired. Jobs are created. Lives are saved. Championships are won. 

High aspirations—and the experience to get there

Two weeks later, Bellamkonda elaborates on what excellence means to him. Addressing the University Senate, he sets an audacious goal: making Ohio State “the finest public university in the world. Nothing less.” 

He tells the faculty, student and staff leaders gathered in Sullivant Hall that they have the agency to create the Ohio State they want. “The biggest gift we can give each other is to have high expectations of each other,” Bellamkonda says.

He speaks from personal experience. When Bellamkonda applied for grad school at Brown, he expected to earn a master’s degree and then return to India. But when he received his acceptance letter, he was surprised to discover Brown had admitted him into its doctoral program. 

“I called them and said, “You made a mistake,’” Bellamkonda recalls during the April interview. “They said, ‘Oh, we loved your application, and we are confident you’ll do well in the PhD program.”

They were right. He fell in love with research, completed his doctorate in 1994 and built an unexpected life for himself in the U.S., becoming a renowned biomedical scientist and an American citizen. High expectations changed everything.

Ohio State notched a major win with the successful recruitment of Bellamkonda in 2024. In a highly competitive job market, university leaders persuaded the then Emory University chief academic officer to make a somewhat unusual career move, jumping from a private school to a public one and from one provostship to another.

Previously, Bellamkonda was the Vinik Dean of the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University and a professor and department chair at Georgia Institute of Technology. At all these stops, Bellamkonda has left his mark: recruiting and retaining faculty, raising money for new buildings, developing new classes, increasing research dollars, encouraging collaboration. 

“Every place he’s been, he’s taken something that was already good and made it even better,” says Wexner Medical Center’s Warner, a co-chair of Ohio State’s provost search committee.

Bellamkonda has done the same at Ohio State, even in his short time here. While the framework for the university’s Education for Citizenship 2035 strategic plan was announced before his arrival, Bellamkonda and his team developed many of its signature academic initiatives after he started in January 2025.

Those include the $100 million Game Changer Scholars campaign to attract and retain eminent faculty, and the AI Fluency initiative, which aims to make every Ohio State student, beginning with the class of 2029, proficient in both their field of study and in artificial intelligence. 

Bellamkonda and his team also paired that initiative—one of the most comprehensive of its kind in higher education—with a research equivalent, AI^(x) Hub, an effort to bring together scientists from across the university to use AI to solve real-word problems.

Change was constant and everywhere during Bellamkonda’s provostship. His office assumed oversight of scientific engine ERIK (Enterprise for Research, Innovation and Knowledge) and launched a new Career Center of Excellence. He rolled out efforts to hire 100 new AI experts, make targeted investments in six colleges and offer earlier access to experiential learning. 

“He elevated and centered the academic mission of the university and laid out some exciting opportunities to expand it,” says Brown, who served as vice provost from June 2025 to his appointment as interim provost this spring.

The pace was intense—and Bellamkonda can be impatient, by his own admission—but he also made the experience inspiring.

 “He knows how to think big but in a thoughtful way,” says Shereen Agrawal, executive director of the Center for Software Innovation and associate vice president for student innovation and entrepreneurship. 

“You can always run a team at a very high RPM, but you can’t do it for very long,” says Horack, the university’s research chief. “Ravi is very mindful of what it takes to get meaningful strategic results over the long term. That it’s all about setting the right kind of culture, the right kind of environment, where everybody on his team is known, cared for and challenged in the right ways.”

And Bellamkonda has a wide definition of team. In February, he hosted a belated holiday dinner for his executive leadership group in the Office of Academic Affairs, and he insisted that his colleagues bring their significant others. At the dinner, Bellamkonda thanked these spouses and partners, telling them that his amazing team couldn’t achieve what they have without their support and sacrifice.

As they drove home afterward, Brown and his wife talked about the heartfelt act, how few leaders would have thought to do and say something like it. “It was notable,” Brown says. “It was very notable.”

‘Hard things worth doing together’

During the early days of his presidency, Bellamkonda has focused on assembling his executive team and better understanding the job, including new responsibilities such as athletics. 

“To say the transition was sudden would be an understatement,” he says. “But what has made it really wonderful has been that I was here already.” He feels confident in the university’s current direction in large part because he helped chart it.

He’s also approaching the job with humility. He says the unexpected resignation of his predecessor doesn’t define Ohio State. What defines it is the brilliant, transformative and purpose-driven work occurring at the university. He often calls these galvanizing projects “hard things worth doing together,” such as curing cancer, improving mental health, understanding the causes of war and driving economic growth in the state. 

“That is Ohio State,” Bellamkonda says. “It’s not me. It’s not you. It’s our mission.”

Bellamkonda says the university has made progress since he came to Ohio State, and he expects more to come. 

“For good or bad, I’m not a maintenance-type person,” he says. “I’ve had opportunities in my life to truly move the needle in every role I’ve had. It’s hard here because it’s a big and complex place. But my hope is that not only do we maintain momentum, but we accelerate it.”

The university community sees an example of that momentum in mid-April, a month after Bellamkonda’s appointment. At Ohio State Lima, university, community and state leaders gather to celebrate the Regional Campus Commitment, a new program that covers tuition and mandatory fees for low- to middle-income students who start at the Lima, Mansfield, Marion and Newark campuses or Ohio State Agricultural Technical Institute in Wooster.

The initiative—part of the Education for Citizenship strategic plan—aims to expand access and affordability, address key workforce needs and create more pathways to earn Ohio State degrees. Participating students can transfer to the Columbus campus or complete four-year degrees at a regional campus.

If Bellamkonda hadn’t stepped into the presidency so quickly, this gathering may not have happened. Carter’s resignation put the event’s future in doubt, even though it had been in the works for months. Then Bellamkonda came on board, affirmed his support, and the work continued. 

“Thank you, President Bellamkonda, for choosing to stand behind regional campuses and all of the students who are here,” said Ohio State Lima biology senior Sophia Walker, one of several speakers at the event. “We are extremely grateful.”

In interviews, other event participants reinforce Walker’s comments about Bellamkonda. 

“I could not be happier or more thrilled that he’s the president,” says Ohio State Lima Dean Margaret “Meggie” Young. “He’s been so supportive of the regional campuses and what it is that we do.” 

Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, a Lima resident whose office helped organize the celebration, calls Bellamkonda an innovator and a reformer. “I’m excited about his tenure,” he says.

When Bellamkonda addresses the crowd at the Perry Webb Student Life Building, he talks about the complementary nature of Ohio State’s regional campuses. Students can stay close to home while benefiting from smaller classes, local internships, one-of-a-kind programs and professors woven into their communities. Yet they also can choose to come to Columbus and take advantage of the “$1.6 billion research engine represented on that campus.”

This combination mixes excellence with civic responsibility. “At Ohio State, we take our land-grant mission seriously, and we take seriously our mission to be the flagship university of the great state of Ohio.”

The university can do both—and do it with compassion and joy.

Senior Writer Todd Jones contributed to this story.