[2][8][9] In September 1957, Puri moved the United States as he got appointed as an instructor and graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

His studies were supervised by Erich Lehmann[10] and he was awarded his doctorate in 1962 after submitting a thesis titled Asymptotic Efficiency of a Class of c-Sample Tests.

[2][8] Additionally, he was an elected member of the New York Academy of Sciences, and an honorary fellow of the International Indian Statistical Society.

[8][15] He has many books published in his honour, including Research Developments in Probability and Statistics: Festschrift in Honor of Madan L. Puri on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, which has articles written by fifty two different authors.

[15][17] He was ranked as the fourth most prolific statistician in the world in a report by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.