Karen Mossberger is the Frank and June Sackton Professor in the School of Public Affairs in the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions at Arizona State University. She is also a senior sustainability scholar with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. Her research interests include local governance, urban policy, digital inequality, evaluation of broadband programs and digital government. Her most recent books are "Digital Cities: The Internet and the Geography of Opportunity" (Oxford University Press 2012, with C. Tolbert and W. Franko), as well as the "Oxford Handbook of Urban Politics" (2012, with S. Clarke and P. John). Previous books include "Digital Citizenship: The Internet, Society and Participation" (Mossberger, Tolbert and McNeal 2008, MIT Press), "Virtual Inequality: Beyond the Digital Divide" (Mossberger, Tolbert and Stansbury 2003, Georgetown University Press), and "The Politics of Ideas and the Spread of Enterprise Zones" (2000, Georgetown University Press). Co-authored research on “Race, Place, and Information Technology” won the best paper award for the Public Policy Section of the American Political Science Association in 2005, and "The Effects of E-Government on Trust and Confidence in Government" was honored as one of the 75 most influential articles in the first 75 years of Public Administration Review. In 2018, she received the Donald C. Stone Scholar award from the American Society for Public Administration's Section on Intergovernmental Administration and Management (SIAM).

Mossberger's research includes a National Science Foundation-sponsored repository for broadband data (in collaboration with the University of Iowa) and the evaluation of the Smart Communities Program, a digital inclusion initiative in nine Chicago neighborhoods. She is working on an edited volume on the evaluation of the policy impacts of broadband. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Chicago Community Trust, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, among others. She has served as president of the American Political Science Association's Urban Politics section and Information and Technology Politics section, chair of the International Political Science Association's research committee on Electronic Democracy and was elected a fellow in the National Academy of Public Administration in 2016.