Why everybody loves Ravi Bellamkonda: Five facts
Our president is a devoted reader, gifted teacher, startup founder, sports fan, dog dad. You might find him with a racket.
He’s a walking news feed
Bellamkonda reads up to 10 newspapers a day, a mix of U.S. and international outlets. And he consumes both heavy and lighter fare. “It could even be society page stuff,” his wife says.
He’s an entrepreneur
Atlanta-based Exvade Bioscience is commercializing technology that grew out of Bellamkonda’s lab at Georgia Tech when he was there. The Tumor Monorail—a small medical device that gives doctors a new way to support the treatment of aggressive brain tumors—is in a Phase 1 human clinical trial at the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke University. Bellamkonda is the startup’s scientific founder.
He loves sports
Bellamkonda excels at racket sports. An excellent table tennis player in India, he shifted to squash when he moved to Rhode Island to attend Brown University. Then at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, tennis became his game, which he still enjoys playing. “He’s an incredibly good tennis player,” Kaligotla says.
But he loves pretty much all sports—and will watch them all on TV. Kaligotla says her husband, a former college cricket player, wakes up at “ungodly hours” to view Indian national cricket matches.
And while he was on the faculty at Case Western Reserve University from 1995 to 2003, he became a huge Cleveland sports fan—and continues to cheer for those teams to this day. He even turned his daughter, Ameya, who was born in Atlanta, into a Cleveland Browns backer.
“I feel a little guilty about that,” he says with a laugh.
He’s a serious dog dad
Eight-year-old goldendoodle C.J. joined the Bellamkonda family while Ameya was in high school. In part, mom and dad wanted to give their daughter some additional company after older brother Mihir left the house to attend Duke University. But it didn’t take long for the entire family to fall in love with the good-natured pooch, who’s named after C.J. Cregg on “The West Wing.” Bellamkonda says C.J., his first pet, has transformed his life, making him more open, empathetic and vulnerable. “I tell people, I like who I am when I’m with her,” he says.
He’s a beloved teacher
He was such a popular professor at Georgia Tech, Kaligotla says, the fire marshal once had to break up a lecture because so many students tried to attend, spilling out of the auditorium and into a stairway. Undergraduates there voted him “best professor.”
Even high achievers would leave his office happy after he explained why they got a C. “I’d say, ‘How do you manage to do that when they’re crying when they get a B in my class?’” Kaligotla says with a laugh. “He just seems to have a way. He doesn’t change his decision, but people don’t feel the pain of it.”
