Donald Rubin
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Donald Bruce Rubin (born December 22, 1943) is an Emeritus Professor of Statistics at
Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...
, where he chaired the department of Statistics for 13 years. He also works at
Tsinghua University Tsinghua University (THU) is a public university in Haidian, Beijing, China. It is affiliated with and funded by the Ministry of Education of China. The university is part of Project 211, Project 985, and the Double First-Class Constructio ...
in China and at
Temple University Temple University (Temple or TU) is a public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related research university in Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. It was founded in 1884 by the Baptist ministe ...
in Philadelphia. He is most well known for the Rubin causal model, a set of methods designed for
causal Causality is an influence by which one Event (philosophy), event, process, state, or Object (philosophy), object (''a'' ''cause'') contributes to the production of another event, process, state, or object (an ''effect'') where the cause is at l ...
inference Inferences are steps in logical reasoning, moving from premises to logical consequences; etymologically, the word '' infer'' means to "carry forward". Inference is theoretically traditionally divided into deduction and induction, a distinct ...
with observational data, and for his methods for dealing with
missing data In statistics, missing data, or missing values, occur when no data value is stored for the variable in an observation. Missing data are a common occurrence and can have a significant effect on the conclusions that can be drawn from the data. Mi ...
. In 1977 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.


Biography

Rubin was born in
Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...
into a Jewish family of lawyers. As an undergraduate Rubin attended the accelerated
Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...
PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...
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 A freshman, fresher, first year, or colloquially frosh, is a person in the first year at an educational institution, usually a secondary school or at the college and university level, but also in other forms of post-secondary educational in ...
matriculation Matriculation is the formal process of entering a university, or of becoming eligible to enter by fulfilling certain academic requirements such as a matriculation examination. Australia In Australia, the term ''matriculation'' is seldom used no ...
). He switched to
psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...
and graduated in 1965. He began graduate school in psychology at Harvard with a
National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...
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 Educational Testing Service (ETS), founded in 1947, is the world's largest private educational testing and assessment organization. It is headquartered in Lawrence Township, Mercer County, New Jersey, Lawrence Township, New Jersey, but has a P ...
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 statistical analysis of observational data, propensity score matching (PSM) is a statistical matching technique that attempts to estimate the effect of a treatment, policy, or other intervention by accounting for the covariates that pred ...
in the early 1980s with Paul Rosenbaum, and a textbook on the subject with Nobel prize winning econometrician
Guido Imbens Guido Wilhelmus Imbens (born 3 September 1963) is a Dutch-American economist whose research concerns econometrics and statistics. He holds the Applied Econometrics Professorship in Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business at Stanf ...
in 2015.


References


External links


Rubin's page on Harvard University Statistics Department website
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Rubin, Donald Survey methodologists Harvard University faculty Temple University faculty Quantitative psychologists Princeton University alumni 1943 births Living people Bayesian statisticians Fellows of the American Statistical Association Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences alumni Corresponding fellows of the British Academy American educational psychologists American mathematical statisticians