About

Santosh Kumar is associate professor of development and global health economics in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. He also is an affiliate of Notre Dame’s Eck Institute for Global Health and has been a faculty fellow of the Kellogg Institute since 2023.

Kumar is an applied microeconomist whose research focuses on the economics of global health and economic development in low- and middle-income countries. His research examines the causal association between child and maternal health, human capital, and poverty.

Kumar’s work uses experimental and quasi-experimental research methods and has extensive experience collecting survey data in India, Bhutan, and Albania. His research has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including. Currently he is assistant editor of the Journal of Economic Insight and Oxford Open Economics, and he is the academic editor of PLOS ONE and PLOS Global Public Health.

He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and he also has worked at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle. Prior to coming to Notre Dame, Kumar was an associate professor of economics at Sam Houston State University in Texas.

He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Houston.

KDR Assistant:
Katy Klein