Santosh Kumar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics and International Business at Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX, USA. Before joining SHSU, Dr. Kumar worked at the University of Washington, Seattle, and the HCPDS at the Harvard University.

His research focuses on development economics, program evaluation, and global health including the exploration of long-term effects of in-utero and early-life conditions on human capital in developing countries. Some of his previous works have explored the effect of vaccination, iron deficiency, access to road, electricity, microfinance, distance to the health facilities, access to iodized salt, exposure to drought, and sanitation on development outcomes such as cognition, education, child health in Bhutan and India. His articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals, such as Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Health Economics, Demography, Social Science and Medicine, Applied Economics, Population and Development Review, PLoS ONE, and Journal of Public Health.

He has served as consultants for Asian Development Bank, Albanian Development Fund, and IARD. Dr. Kumar holds a MA in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Houston, TX, USA.