[2] He and a few other students obtained a grant from the university, learned basic Bosnian, and procured placements from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to volunteer at camps in the region.

Kara worked as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch in New York City for several years, during which time he was involved in some of the firm's largest M&A and equity financing transactions.

While attending Columbia, he became increasingly aware of the need for a more analytical finance and economics approach to understanding modern slavery.

[4] The summer he graduated from Columbia, he embarked on the first of several long self-funded journeys across the world to research contemporary slavery and child labor.

Upon his return, he decided not to resume his career in investment banking, in order to be able to continue his research and analysis of contemporary slavery.

[6] Kara's research travels have taken him to more than fifty countries across six continents, where he has interviewed several thousand former and current slaves of all kinds.

[3] In January 2023, Kara's non-fiction book Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives was released by St. Martin's Press, which debuted on the NY Times Bestseller List and was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction.

[22] Its geographic focus is South Asia, covering such industries as hand-woven-carpet making, tea and rice farming, construction, brick manufacture, and frozen-shrimp production.

The book had its launch at the United Nations, and has been lauded by experts in the field, including Luis CdeBaca, former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons and Swanee Hunt, former U.S.

[29] As part of the program he began an Associate Professor position with the Rights Lab and the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham in October 2020.