Ben is a Managing Partner at MSA Capital, a global investment firm with over $2 billion in assets under management. MSA's primary focus is North America and Greater China high growth technology investments. Mr Harburg also leads MSA Novo, the emerging markets-focused franchise of MSA. Ben has significant investment and operations experience in Greater China, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa.
He sits on Boards of Directors of various private and public companies and foundations such as the National Committee on US China Relations, the Asian Cultural Council, and the Carnegie Endowment’s Tsinghua Center.
He was a Neubauer Scholar at Tufts University (where he studied International Relations), a Fulbright Scholar at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (where he was based in the Department of Islamic Sciences and Oriental Philology), and the first native-born American admitted to Tsinghua University Peoples Bank of China School of Finance’s elite EMBA program.
His passion is soccer and he is a co-owner of Cádiz Club de Fútbol, a team playing in Spain’s First Division (La Liga).
Ben’s recent contribution to Foreign Policy titled “America Can’t Stop China’s Rise. And it should stop trying”, in collaboration with Tony Chan and Kishore Mahbubani can be found HERE.
Ben was an extraordinarily accomplished, dynamic student at the Institute.
I first met him as a high school senior who had been accepted to Tufts University, among many other quality schools. I was an advisor of the Neubauer Scholars Program, incentivizing promising young students to come to Tufts judged to have the capacity for “transforming intellectual leadership.” The scholars were to be offered $10,000 over four years to enact individualized plans of academic study and available to underwrite domestic and international research internships. Ben was accompanied by his father, Fred Harburg, and I was assigned to conduct their University tour. I suddenly felt like a football coach, trying to recruit a star athlete. I was successful, and it began what has now been decades of a warm, unique relationship.
In his first year, Ben enrolled in my Institute’s EPIIC program's 2002-2003 colloquium on Sovereignty and Intervention. EPIIC students are encouraged to pursue in-depth research projects, and Ben joined with two other colloquium students in creating The Sovereignty Exchange. Their objective was to gain a “clearer understanding of what sovereignty means in an interdependent and rapidly evolving international system.” Ben traveled to an annual meeting of ex-presidents and former prime ministers in Madrid, where they were able to discuss these issues with luminaries such as President Mary Robinson of Ireland and President Cesar Gaviria of Colombia. Other notable interviewees for the project included former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Nicaraguan President Enrique Bolanos and MIT professor Noam Chompsky.
Presenting his work, he successfully applied for a position with the Hague Office of the Prosecutor on the Slobodan Milosevic case at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. I vividly remember the phone call I got from a very surprised and embarrassed official at The Hague. Ben had accurately described himself as a first-year student. They assumed that meant the first year of law school, their prerequisite for the position. It took some convincing to allow Ben the chance to prove himself. He ultimately received a very high evaluation.
It was the beginning of a very interesting array of challenging projects that Ben would undertake during his undergraduate era - serving as the counter-terrorism portfolio manager for the U.S. Mission to NATO in Brussels, where he collaborated with terrorism experts from Europe and North Africa to analyze global trends and develop counterterrorism policy objectives for the alliance; and working on security sector reform in the Balkans while working on the Kosovo Desk at the Office of South Central European Affairs at the U.S. State Department.
His interest in conflict and terrorism developed while he was working for the Basque conflict resolution NGO, Elkarri, in the summer of 2003 in San Sebastian and as a student research associate for the International Security Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, concentrating on North Korean and Iranian nuclear policy. I also introduced him to a new program I helped to advise, Humanity in Action, with Judy Goldstein, and he became one of their Fellows in 2005 and previously served on their Board of Advisers.
Ben was not all-mind. He captained the Tufts Varsity Crew team, and he introduced me to the erg, and I positioned a Concept 2 machine in my office. Ben graduated from Tufts University magna cum laude in 2006 with a BA in International Relations. He held the Neubauer scholarship to extremely high standards in its first year, enabling me to hold successive classes to the same bar. Upon graduation, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to Germany, where he studied the radicalization of Muslim youth in Germany and homegrown terrorism.
Ben has a clear sense of accountability. He became a critical supporter and underwriter of future generations of Institute students, providing advice and funds for their research travel. He was at times a funder in moments in extremis, when unusual demands were made on our finances. There was one glaring unexpected moment when a new administration stopped supporting the Bacow administration's enlightened policy, where graduating seniors were supported for their culminating post-graduation summer senior research trips, many of which were derived from their senior honors theses.
One of my most fulfilling aspirations is being able to mentor the children of my alumni, usually university or high school students, in this case, it will be his and Jenny's child, Tiger, a precocious 12-year-old!