[3] He is most well known for the Rubin causal model, a set of methods designed for causal inference with observational data, and for his methods for dealing with missing data.
[5] 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 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.
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.