 Kulkarni has received many awards and honours, including the NSF's Alan T. Waterman Award in 1992, the Helen B. Warner Prize from the American Astronomical Society in
1991, the Jansky Prize in 2002 and the Dan David Prize in 2017.In 2015, he received an honorary doctorate from Radboud University in the Netherlands.Kulkarni has been the Jury Chair for the Infosys Prize for the discipline of Physical Sciences since 2009.