Lalita Kaligotla is driven to make a difference
With college degrees in social work, business and education, our president’s wife believes leadership starts with community.
Lalita Kaligotla at Heminger Hall, the home base of the College of Nursing, where she serves as an associate clinical professor (Photo by Corey Wilson)
Lalita Kaligotla has lived a life of relentless curiosity.
She’s aided incarcerated women in Mumbai, Boston and Cleveland. She’s earned graduate degrees in social work, business and education. She’s an expert on citizenship, community engagement and leadership development. And during the pandemic, she shifted her focus into nursing. Rightfully so, she calls herself a “silo buster.”
“She just never sits still,” says her husband, Ohio State President Ravi V. Bellamkonda. “She’s always going, and she’s got such great positive energy that I admire.”
Growing up in Hyderabad, India, Kaligotla was deeply influenced by her grandfathers. One was an attorney and the other a physician, and both answered Gandhi’s call for educated Indians to live and work among rural people. Their civic examples inspired her in part to study social work.
“Social work felt meaningful,” she recalls. “I guess a more traditional path would have been going to medical school, which was an option, but I was a little bit of a rebel growing up.”
From there, Kaligotla’s life has gone in many directions. While living in Cleveland, she earned an MBA from Case Western Reserve University. While living in Atlanta, she received a doctorate of education from the University of Georgia. Her work shifted from helping justice-involved women to teaching, studying and supporting leadership development, experiential learning and community engagement.
But a common thread does run through her career: community service.
“Through acts of service, we diminish our differences and begin to see each other as collaborators rather than strangers or adversaries both within our campus community and beyond,” she wrote in a 2024 op-ed in The Emory Wheel, Emory University’s student newspaper.
At Ohio State, Kaligotla is building on work that she began at Emory University’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, where she implemented federally funded programs in workforce development and expanding access to healthcare. She also led initiatives to help build leadership skills and foster community among students, staff and faculty.
Today, Kaligotla serves as an associate clinical professor at Ohio State’s College of Nursing, as well as senior director for leadership, policy engagement and innovation.
In the spring, Kaligotla taught a class on curriculum design in the college’s doctoral program and found herself impressed by her students. “They’re an incredibly engaged, active group of students and a really fun group to be with,” she says.
