Rubin was born in
Washington, D.C. into a Jewish family of lawyers. As an undergraduate Rubin attended the accelerated
Princeton University PhD program where he was one of a cohort of 20 students mentored by the
physicist John Wheeler (the intention of the program was to confer degrees within 5 years of
freshman matriculation). He switched to
psychology and graduated in 1965. He began graduate school in psychology at Harvard with a
National Science Foundation fellowship, but because his statistics background was considered insufficient, he was asked to take introductory statistics courses. Rubin became a PhD student again, this time in statistics under
William Cochran at the Harvard Statistics Department. After graduating from Harvard in 1970, he began working at the
Educational Testing Service in 1971, and served as a visiting faculty member at
Princeton's new statistics department. He published his major papers on the
Rubin causal model in 1974–1980, seminal papers on
propensity score matching in the early 1980s with
Paul Rosenbaum, and a textbook on the subject with Nobel prize winning econometrician
Guido Imbens in 2015. In 1977 he was elected as a
Fellow of the American Statistical Association. In 2007, Rubin was awarded the
George W. Snedecor Award by the
Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies. == References ==