Director of the PhD Program in International Business Administration at Texas A&M International University. Served the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas as vice president, chief international economist and director of the Dallas Fed's Center for Latin American Economics. His research focuses on international trade, international capital flows, currency regimes and banking-chiefly as these subjects apply to developing countries, in particular those of Latin America. He has published extensively on these topics in scholarly and technical journals.

Gruben holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Texas at Austin. He worked as a research associate at the university's Institute for Latin American Studies and it's Center for Economic Development. He has served on the faculty of economics at Southern Methodist University and on the faculty of International Management Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas