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Ravi Bellamkonda named 18th president of Ohio State
Bellamkonda, the current provost, joined the university in 2025.
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Malvika Choudhary - Thu, 12, Mar 2026
- 16:44 EDT
- 31
Ravi Bellamkonda / X/Ravi Bellamkonda
Indian American biomedical engineer Ravi V. Bellamkonda has been appointed the 18th president of The Ohio State University, following a decision by the university’s Board of Trustees on March 12.
Bellamkonda joined Ohio State in January 2025 as executive vice president and provost, overseeing the university’s academic enterprise, including 15 colleges, four regional campuses and more than 8,800 faculty members.
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In his new role as president, he will lead the public research university that enrolls more than 67,000 students across six campuses in Ohio. The university’s main campus is located in Columbus, with regional campuses in Lima, Mansfield, Marion, Newark and Wooster, along with the Wexner Medical Center and a major athletics program.
In a video message following the announcement, Bellamkonda thanked the university community for welcoming him and said Ohio State combines academic strength with its widely known athletic achievements.
“My fellow Buckeyes, Lalitha and I have been here over 400 days, and it warms our hearts to experience the generosity with which we’ve been welcomed,” Bellamkonda said. “The whole world knows that we’re an athletics powerhouse at Ohio State… But what the world doesn’t know as well, as I do now, is that we are an academic powerhouse.”
In his previous role, Bellamkonda helped shape early phases of the university’s Education for Citizenship 2035 strategic plan, which focuses on academic excellence, student success and expanding leadership in artificial intelligence.
Under his leadership, the university launched initiatives including AI Fluency, aimed at integrating artificial intelligence into undergraduate education, a new Career Center of Excellence designed to strengthen connections between students and employers, and faculty hiring programs intended to recruit leading scholars.
Before joining Ohio State, Bellamkonda served as provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at Emory University, where he led initiatives in faculty recruitment, curricular innovation and the use of artificial intelligence in fields such as medicine, business and law.
He also helped launch the Student Flourishing initiative and the Emory Purpose Project focused on well-being and ethics.
Earlier in his career, Bellamkonda was the Vinik Dean of Engineering at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering. He previously served as the Wallace H. Coulter professor and chair of the department of biomedical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University and as associate vice president for research at Georgia Tech. He began his academic career at Case Western Reserve University.
Bellamkonda is also an internationally recognized biomedical researcher. His laboratory developed new approaches for treating pediatric and adult brain tumors, including a tumor monorail device recognized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a breakthrough technology.
The device entered a Phase 1 clinical trial in December 2025 to evaluate its ability to monitor recurrent glioblastoma.
He received a National Institutes of Health Director’s Transformative Research Award in 2021 for related work supported by the National Cancer Institute. Bellamkonda holds 11 U.S. patents and has served as president of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering from 2014 to 2016.
He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering and the Society for Biomaterials, and a senior member of the National Academy of Inventors.
Bellamkonda earned a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from Osmania University, a doctorate in medical science and biomaterials from Brown University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in neurobiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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