Athlone native made provost of major US university
Athlone native David Madigan has been appointed provost of the University of Southern California, one of the most senior academic positions at the university.
Madigan is the youngest child of Mrs Eithne Madigan, former teacher at the Fair Green national school, and brother to two sisters Niamh and Ide Madigan.
He attended the Marist National School and then secondary school in the Marist College, before going on to completing his bachelor's degree in mathematics and a Ph.D. in statistics both from Trinity College Dublin.
The 64-year-old has spent more than three decades in American higher education, holding academic and leadership positions at universities including the University of Washington, Rutgers, Columbia and Northeastern.
During his career, he has advised the FDA on drug safety and served as editor-in-chief of Statistical Science and Statistical Analysis and Data Mining, two leading journals in the field.
Now, Madigan will hold the Shelly and Ofer Nemirovsky Provost’s Chair and will serve on the faculty as professor of data sciences and operations at the USC Marshall School of Business, with joint appointments in the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and the Department of Mathematics at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
He will assume his new duties on Tuesday, October 13, succeeding Andrew T. Guzman, who has served in that position since 2023 and will continue contributing to USC’s academic mission as a returning member of the USC Gould School of Law faculty.
In 2014, while serving as dean of Columbia University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Madigan reflected on the trajectory his life had taken.
Speaking at the time, he said, his journey was “not quite what I anticipated growing up in Athlone.”Madigan was eight years old when his father died of heart disease in 1971.
In those early days, he would do his homework in the workshop where his uncle was building a sailboat. The memories have stayed with him: the dusty aroma of freshly cut mahogany, the sounds of construction, and the days and nights spent sailing his uncle's boat, Matilda, on Lough Ree.
“The lake was a feature of my life,” he said.