Cullum studied chemical engineering at
Virginia Tech, graduating in 1960. She continued at Virginia Tech for a master's degree in mathematics in 1962, with the master's thesis
Applications of the analog computer to mathematical problems. She completed a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at the
University of California, Berkeley, in 1966. Her dissertation,
Continuous Optimal Control Problems with Phase Space Constraints, concerned control theory, and was supervised by Stephen Diliberto. She worked for
IBM Research at the
Thomas J. Watson Research Center from 1967 until 1998, when she moved to the
Los Alamos National Laboratory. She served as president of the IEEE Control Systems Society in 1989. ==Books==