Ohio State’s new provost is ‘engaged and engaging’

Ravi Bellamkonda smiles easily. He enjoys laughing, too. And he’s a bit of a hugger. “My home college,” he beams, referring to his engineering background, before collegially embracing College of Engineering Dean Ayanna Howard on a school tour this 20-degree morning in Columbus.

Another thing the new executive vice president and provost does? Asks a lot of questions. He listens intently, curious about, well, everything and everyone. Their work. Their ideas. What drives them. It’s not an act. The guy reads 10 newspapers a day, follows numerous sports, consumes every book he can get his hands on and loves to engage with people.

“This is who I am. I like knowing things,” says Bellamkonda, a renowned biomedical engineer and accomplished higher education leader with stints at prestigious institutions such as Georgia Tech, Duke and Emory. “The more curious you are, it makes for a richer picture of the world. Shades and nuances—there’s beauty in nuance. Curiosity and knowledge give you nuance, which makes the world richer. It makes my life richer.”

Since beginning his role as provost in mid-January, Bellamkonda has experienced many shades of scarlet and gray: a national football championship, campus tours and meeting many, many Buckeyes. He likes what he sees—which is good considering he left a “great job” as executive vice president and provost at Emory to come to Columbus. He left Atlanta’s warmth. He handed over a distinguished research laboratory he had built and nurtured everywhere he went.

But now, Bellamkonda is focused on Ohio State, and it’s not lost on those he’s met in his early days at the helm. “He’s all in,” says Karla Zadnik, Ohio State’s interim provost in 2024 and current interim dean of the College of Public Health. “He’s engaged and engaging and that’s an unbeatable combination.”

In Ohio State, Bellamkonda sees a golden opportunity served up by the Goldilocks mixture of the university’s land-grant mission and President Walter “Ted” Carter Jr.’s vision for excellence in his “Education for Citizenship 2035” plan. “I’m looking for meaning and impact,” Bellamkonda says. “When I think about a first-generation student learning skills, discovering who they are and going out into the world, it’s not just that student. It’s their family. It has a generational impact. That kind of impact is possible at some amazing institutions, but the sheer numbers at which we do that make it very meaningful.

“The magic here is the students and shaping our future through shaping them.”

Carter says Bellamkonda is his most important hire because academics come first on his list of core strategic themes. “When I first saw Ravi’s resume, it stood out among all the other candidates, and we had some of the most exceptional candidates you could ever expect,” Carter says. “But what really stood out was his passion for education, someone who has seen firsthand what an education can do for a person.”

In 1989, at 21 years old, Bellamkonda left his native India and arrived at Brown University in Rhode Island as a grad student with $800 in his pocket and no familiar faces in the United States. Since then, he’s become a U.S. citizen and an entrepreneur, developed innovative brain tumor treatments and earned a reputation as a visionary higher ed administrator.

“He’s incredibly inspiring,” says William Walker, Mattson Family Director of Entrepreneurship at Duke Engineering, who worked for Bellamkonda when he was dean of Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering. “I’ve not worked with too many people where I thought, ‘I wish I was more like them.’ The initiatives he took on here were substantial, and they changed the flavor of the school, the student experience, for the better.”

At Emory, Interim Provost Lanny Liebeskind had a similar experience. “For me personally, he was very inspirational, a strongly principled leader who looks for good, constructive, creative change,” Liebeskind says. “He’s deeply thoughtful … but it’s never about him—it’s about what he can do for people.”

Bellamkonda showed that dynamism with his embrace of artificial intelligence. At Emory, among many successful initiatives, he spearheaded AI.Humanity, which recruited nearly 50 faculty members who developed AI-focused educational programs for digital literacy while advancing ethical uses. “Those kinds of efforts energize me,” Bellamkonda says. “That you can imagine something, work with a group of smart people, and put something in place that benefits student after student and they’re transformed.”

Carter wants Ohio State to lead the way in the AI revolution and believes Bellamkonda will spearhead it. Says Bellamkonda: “The true potential of AI will be when we integrate it as a tool in the service of things we already care about as a university. And we care about the whole breadth of things.

“I would like Ohio State to be a leader in creating ‘bilingual students’—students who are amazing economists but know AI; who love literature but know natural language processing; who investigate historical texts but use AI tools to make their work faster and better. A doctor who knows AI is better than a doctor who doesn’t.”

Bellamkonda has a track record of bringing his vision to life. One such game-changer came from his work as a biomedical engineer: His lab invented a potentially life-saving approach to treating brain tumors, which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration called a “breakthrough device.” Human trials are underway at the startup Exvade Bioscience, where Bellamkonda serves as scientific founder. Also, in 2021, his team received a National Institutes of Health Director’s Transformative Research Award for designing a “tractor beam” to treat pediatric brain tumors. “That work has been deeply meaningful,” he says.

And now he turns his sights on his new role, one that he believes promises similar meaning. “Rarely are institutions in a position where everything is aligned,” Bellamkonda says. “We have an amazing history, a strong institution, leadership that thirsts to make the world better. So how do we do that? That’s the journey ahead and that’s what I’m really excited about.”