Rubin is the President and a Trustee of Rothschild Wilder, a private foundation that supports social justice and ethics, science and innovation, the arts and humanities, and the preservation of popular culture artifacts.

[1] He is also Chair of the Board of Directors of Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut, where he is Chief Executive Officer emeritus and was for many years a senior scientist.

Philip Rubin's research spans a number of disciplines, combining computational, engineering, linguistic, physiological, and psychological approaches to study embodied cognition, most particularly the biological bases of speech and language.

These include: participating with Rod McGuire on Haskins aspects of the ARPANET Network Voice Protocol, a predecessor of Voice over IP; collaborating with Leonard Szubowicz, Douglas Whalen, and others on digitized speech, particularly extensions of the Haskins Pulse-code modulation (PCM) implementation,[9] focusing on expanding temporal markers and event labels; and working with Patrick Nye on the Digital Pattern Playback, which was eventually replaced by Rubin's HADES system.

This 3-dimensional model of the vocal tract permits researchers to replicate MRI images of actual speakers and has been used to study the relation between speech production and perception.

With colleagues Hosung Nam,[17] Catherine Browman, Louis Goldstein, Michael Proctor,[18] Elliot Saltzman, and Mark Tiede, a software system called TADA[19] was developed.

It was the first sinewave synthesis system developed for the automatic, large-scale creation of stimuli for perceptual experiments, and has been used by Robert Remez, Rubin, David B. Pisoni,[22] and other colleagues and researchers to study the time-varying characteristics of the speech signal.

With Carol Fowler, Robert Remez, and Michael Turvey, Rubin introduced the consideration of speech in terms of a dynamical systems / action theory perspective.

[26] Rubin's theoretical approach to perception and production, particularly in the case of speech, eschews attention to the momentary and punctate aspects of the signal, focusing not on traditional features and cues, but on spatiotemporal coordination of global aspects of the system, such as spectral coherence over long stretches of time (an approach related to current speech understanding systems, like Siri or Amazon Alexa).

They have noted that "the criteria for the perceptual organization of speech - visible, audible, and even palpable - are actually specified in a general form, removed from any particular sensory modality ...",[27] but, to Rubin, related to the underlying spectral coherence of signals created by coordinated physiological activity.

Rubin's articulatory synthesis model, ASY, illustrates how simple physical changes, such as velar opening, directly account for degrees of nasality, avoiding the complexity of attempting to reconcile numerous spectral cues.

[29] This event orientation evolved into a gestural computational system[30] developed at Haskins Laboratories that combined ASY with the articulatory phonology of Catherine Browman and Louis Goldstein, and the task dynamic model of Elliot Saltzman.

[32] This involves reverse engineering the path from the acoustic signal to its physiological source (aka: the inverse problem) using a gradient maximum likelihood approach.

[38] Rubin returned to the NSF during the second term of the Obama Administration to serve as a senior advisor in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE).

After leaving the NSF in 2003, he continued to be active on human subjects issues as they relate to public policy, including lecturing, writing, co-authoring with Judith Jarvis Thompson and others an AAUP report,[45] participating in activities of the Yale Bioethics Center,[46] and serving on the advisory board of the Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics.

[49] He has also expressed concerns about the ethical and scientific oversight of the use of certain tools and techniques by the intelligence, law enforcement, military, and national security communities, considering some of them to be boondoggles.

An example includes his serving as the Chair of the National Research Council (NRC) Committee on Field Evaluation of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences-Based Methods and Tools for Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence.

[52] On April 6, 2011, he provided testimony at a hearing of the United States House Committee on Oversight and Reform - Behavioral Science and Security: Evaluating TSA's SPOT Program.

In May 2016 Rubin was a signatory to an Open Letter[54] to the World Health Organization (WHO) calling on them to move or postpone the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro over the 2016 epidemic of Zika fever.

[59] On April 16, 2012, Congressman Chakah Fattah (D-PA) introduced House Resolution 613, supporting the OSTP interagency working group on neuroscience that Rubin organized.

Other co-founders and early members include Tony Cecala,[68] Eric Celeste,[69] Richard Crane, Ward J. McFarland, Jr.,[70] David Pogue, Michael D. Rabin,[71] Tom Rielly,[72] Elliot Schlessel, Ed Seidel, and Sharon Steuer.

Between 1999 and some time in the early 2000s, Rubin was technical advisor at ZeniMax Media Parent company of video game publisher Bethesda Softworks.

[107] Rubin is a photographer who, since the 1970s, has concentrated on pictures of wall art,[108] including murals, graffiti, and painted buildings, in the urban centers of the cities that he has visited.

Speaking of the transient nature of wall art, he has said, "The artist is often unknown; the passing of time and the public venues invite unanticipated collaboration.

[110][111][112] He is married to Joette Katz, retired Associate Justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court, and currently a partner at the law firm, Shipman & Goodwin LLP.

[116] In March 2010, Audiobulb Records released a CD by artist Autistici, titled Detached Metal Voice - Early Works (Vol.

[118] Rorschach Audio - Art and Illusion for Sound discusses "Sine-Wave Speech, The Clangers" and other topics, influenced by the sinewave synthesis work of Rubin and colleagues.