Bala previously served as the inaugural dean of the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, for which she helped to secure the naming gift, after being named dean of the Faculty for Computing and Information Science in 2020. In her role as dean, Bala led the school through a time of rapid growth. She expanded the faculty by 30%, in a highly competitive market, to meet student demand and fulfill the school’s mission to benefit society. Under her leadership, Cornell Bowers CIS secured funding for a new 135,000 square foot building, set to open in 2025, which will provide space for new labs, experiential student experiences, and continued faculty growth.

As the lead dean of the Cornell AI Initiative, Bala has worked toward the creation of minors in AI and AI in Society (to launch in 2025), as well as the establishment of the NewYork Presbyterian–Cornell Cardiovascular AI Initiative and the Schmidt AI for Science postdoctoral program. Bala was also co-chair of a cross-campus task force convened to develop guidelines for generative AI usage in Cornell classes.

During her tenure as dean, Bala prioritized increased access and retention for women and underrepresented minorities. As of 2024, women made up 44% of the college’s majors – more than twice the national average – and 18% of the majors came from underrepresented groups. To expand access to summer research opportunities, Bala helped establish the Bowers Undergraduate Research Experience (BURE) program. Through her leadership, Bowers CIS will become a degree-granting college in December 2025.

Prior to her dean appointment, Bala was chair of Cornell’s Department of Computer Science.
As chair, Bala expanded the department’s presence in robotics and artificial intelligence, increased opportunities for undergraduate research and entrepreneurship, and expanded diversity efforts for students and faculty.

Bala’s research expertise is in computer graphics and computer vision, and she has made fundamental contributions to the fields, including in the rendering of computer-generated images, representing and modeling complex materials, and visual discovery in satellite images and large photo collections. Her current research in computer vision is in visual recognition and discovery in satellite images, and recognition of styles and attributes in images. Her early research focused on realistic, physically-based rendering and includes seminal work on scalable rendering, notably the development of approximate illumination algorithms, as well as deep contributions to modeling of textiles.

In addition to numerous teaching awards and publishing a graduate textbook, Bala has received a variety of awards and accolades including the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award (2020) and the IIT Bombay Distinguished Alumnus Award (2021). She is an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow (2019) and a Fellow of the SIGGRAPH Academy (2020).