Some colleges take shape slowly, over decades of departmental mergers and quiet negotiation. This one took shape the way a startup does, in bursts, with a soft launch, a hard launch, and a name attached before the paint had fully dried. At the University of South Florida, the Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing opened in 2025, and it did so as the first college in Florida, and among the first in the nation, to bring artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and computing together within a single academic college.
The Gift That Named It
The college owes its name, and much of its early momentum, to Arnie and Lauren Bellini, USF alumni whose $40 million gift was the largest single philanthropic gift in USF history. Arnie Bellini co-founded the Tampa software company ConnectWise in 1982, a business that was reportedly sold in 2019 for $1.5 billion; the couple has since built a reputation as local philanthropists.
Their gift did not simply put a name on a building; it helped establish an entire college, designed from the outset to sit at the center of USF’s ambitions in AI and cybersecurity rather than at the edge.
Built in Two Stages, On Purpose
“The classes started in fall 2025, but the infrastructure had to be built first,” said Dr. Sudeep Sarkar, the college’s launch dean and interim dean, describing the deliberate pacing behind the college’s arrival.
“We used 2024 as a soft launch to set up systems, update curriculum, hire faculty and get everything in place. Fall 2025 is when it all truly came together.” Dr. Sarkar’s research focuses on computer vision, a field of artificial intelligence that teaches computers to process and analyze visual data.
By the time that first semester was underway, the college had enrolled more than 3,000 bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral students across 15 degree programs, spanning computer science, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, information technology, and computer engineering, taught by about 70 faculty members.
The college has also reported 13 NSF CAREER awardees, along with numerous fellows of organizations including IEEE and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Its computer science research ranks in the top 16 percent nationally according to Academic Analytics data cited by USF.
A Hub, and Whatever Grows Around It
What distinguishes the Bellini College structurally is something Dr. Sarkar calls a “hub-and-spoke model.” The hub sits at the center: the disciplinary majors of computer science, cybersecurity, information technology, and artificial intelligence, all housed within the college itself and focused on foundational research. The spokes radiate outward into the rest of the university; to start, that meant partnerships with USF’s colleges of business, criminology, and social sciences, with the expectation that, over time, every college at USF would find a spoke of its own.
Dr. Sarkar has explained the pairing of the college’s two most urgent disciplines in plain terms: artificial intelligence needs to be secured, and AI itself is already changing how cybersecurity work gets done, which is precisely why the college refused to separate the two fields in the first place.
USF Provost and Executive Vice President Prasant Mohapatra envisions the new college as a university-wide connector, creating opportunities for faculty and students in fields far removed from traditional computing to work with AI and other emerging technologies. The model is deliberately interdisciplinary, bringing areas such as nursing, business, ethics, and the arts into conversations about how technology can address complex problems.
Gert-Jan de Vreede, a faculty member who plans to keep an appointment in USF’s Muma College of Business while also participating in the new college, sees that cross-disciplinary structure as one of Bellini College’s defining strengths, particularly because it can encourage collaboration between people who would not traditionally work within the same academic boundaries.
The Mad Scientist Who Became a Pioneer
No history of the Bellini College is complete without Lawrence Hall, a distinguished university professor and the college’s associate dean of research and innovation, who was among USF’s earliest artificial intelligence researchers back when the field looked, to most outsiders, like science fiction rather than science. Colleagues in his early years had a nickname for him: the mad scientist. He does not seem to mind the label, and he has, in the decades since, earned another one. Pioneer.
A Building Still to Come
For now, the college operates out of the sixth floor of the USF Library, at 4101 USF Apple Drive in Tampa, but that arrangement is meant to be temporary. Dr. Sarkar has said the college expects to open a dedicated facility of its own, between 80,000 and 110,000 square feet, on USF’s Tampa campus by mid-2028, although the timeline remains subject to change.
The facility will include teaching, research, and high-tech labs alongside classrooms and space for the college’s growing programs. “This approach ensures that students get real, practical experience with cutting-edge technology, preparing them to hit the ground running in today’s fast-paced tech world,” Sarkar said of the plan.
The state of Florida has already put money behind it: In 2025, Gov. Ron DeSantis approved $10 million to begin construction of the facility, arriving roughly a year after the Bellinis’ original gift and just months after the college’s formal establishment.
It is, in other words, a college still very much under construction, in the literal sense and the institutional one, built quickly but not carelessly, and already, in its first year, behaving like an institution that expects to be around for a very long time.
Also Read: The Rise of Smart Minds: Top AI & Computing Institutions 2026
