Kusum Mundra obtained her Ph.D from University of California, Riverside in 2001 and her M.A. from Delhi School of Economics in 1995. She was an Assistant Professor at San Diego State University and worked in economic litigation consulting at NERA Economic Consulting New York before she joined Rutgers University Newark.
Her areas of interest include immigration and international migration, minority population, terrorism and conflict, and nonparametric and semiparametric panel data models.

She has worked on issues ranging from the effect of immigrant networks on international trade, social networks and the immigrant population, earnings gap across gender, access to healthcare for immigrant women and empirical investigation of suicide bombing events. Some of her publications are in the American Economic Review- Papers and Proceedings, Demography, Journal of International Trade and Economic Development, Handbook of Applied Econometrics and Statistical Inferences, and Terrorism and Political Violence.

She joined IZA as a Research Fellow in September 2009.