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Reuben is with Cornell University's Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise at the Johnson School of Management and a visiting faculty at the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad. He is working with Cornell and the ISB to set up a Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise and a Base of the Pyramid Learning Lab in India. He serves on the global board of directors of George Soros’ Economic Development Fund, a $140 million fund which is involved in catalyzing growth in emerging markets. He was a TED Global Fellow for 2007. He also founded and runs the International Private Enterprise Group (IPEG), a New York based network of professionals, which promotes the role of the private sector, capital markets and technology in catalyzing economic development in emerging markets.
Before Cornell, he finished his Ph.D. from from Columbia University. For his doctoral research, he looked at the relationship between telecommunications and economic development in developing countries. During his time at Columbia, he was an Associate Fellow in Global Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, and also a Fellow at the Public Policy Consortium in 2003-2004. He was a Sloan Foundation Telecommunications Fellow in 2000.
Reuben was a strategic advisor to the RISC (Rural Infrastructure and Services Commons) project. RISC/Deeshaa aimed to correct rural market inefficiencies by providing a shared infrastructure platform for user services in a commercially sustainable way by aggregating rural demand and coordinating infrastructure services. During the past seven years, he has worked at three Columbia University research centers, including the Earth Institute, the Columbia Institute of Tele-Information (CITI), and the Interactive Design Lab. In addition, he also consulted with the World Bank, where he evaluated the economic impact of telecom on countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the Mercosur region, India, and China.
Reuben completed his M.A. and M.Phil from Columbia University. Back in India, He was co-founder of one of the most successful youth magazines in India — Just Another Magazine (J.A.M). He was later involved in another start-up in the telecommunications/content space. Reuben also maintains two blogs, Zoo Station, and The Indian Economy Blog.
