After earning a master's degree in mathematics at
IIT Delhi, Kulkarni went to
Cornell University intending to do doctoral research in pure mathematics, but switched to
operations research after taking a
mathematical programming course in her first year. She earned a second master's degree in 1979 and completed her Ph.D. in 1981. Her doctoral supervisor was Robert E. Bechhofer. She worked for 35 years at the
SAS Institute, including ten years as Vice President of Advanced Analytics R&D. She is the 2022 president of the
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). ==Recognition==