Former Dean of Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, Ray Jayawardhana, has been named the next president of the California Institute of Technology, announced on Tuesday at a community-wide gathering at CalTech.
Jayawardhana served as the 22nd dean of the arts college starting June 2018 and was succeeded by Rachel Bean in July 2023 following his departure to Johns Hopkins University as provost. Prior to his time as dean, Jayawardhana was a professor of astronomy and Hans A. Bethe Professor. He studied physics and astronomy as an undergraduate student at Yale and received a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard. He immigrated to the United States from Sri Lanka.
“Thanks to Ray’s leadership, the college has experienced record-breaking giving from alumni and friends, critical funds to fuel student support, faculty renewal, teaching and research facility upgrades and academic innovation,” President Michael Kotlikoff previously wrote in an email to students after Jayawardhana departed the University for his role at Johns Hopkins in 2023.
During his time as dean, Jayawardhana helped launch several major programs, including Cornell’s Brooks School of Public Policy, the Klarman Fellowship for postdoctoral employees and emerging researchers, the Nexus Scholars program to assist first-time undergraduate student researchers, the Humanities Scholars program, the Distinguished Visiting Journalist program and the renewal of McGraw Hall.
“I call Cornell the non-stuffy Ivy League institution,” Jayawardhana previously told The Sun. “People are very open, supportive, collegial, and incredibly collaborative … It's been really fun to partner with colleagues to generate ideas and identify priorities, but then also to actually work together to advance them.”
Jayawardhana also led the implementation of a new Arts and Sciences curriculum, which began in the Fall of 2020, for undergraduate students. It allowed students to take sign language to fulfill the college’s language requirement and added statistics and data science, social difference and global citizenship as new categories for the distribution requirement system.
“I think of the humanities and social sciences and the sciences as sort of different avenues for exploring what it means to be human, the human condition, the world we live in, the Universe we inhabit,” Jayawardhana previously told The Sun. “The need to explore through humanistic disciplines will endure.”
Prior to his time at Cornell, Jayawardhana was Dean of the Faculty of Science at York University in Toronto, where he started a postdoctoral fellowship program and partnership between York and Fermilab, an American particle physics lab.
Jayawardhana will take over as Caltech’s new president on July 1.
"I am deeply honored to have been selected as Caltech's tenth president and to join this remarkable community of trailblazers," Jayawardhana told the Caltech community.
Zeinab Faraj is a member of the class of 2028 in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is the features editor on the 143rd Editorial Board and was the assistant sports editor of the 143rd Editorial Board. You can reach her at zfaraj@cornellsun.com.
