Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
Dr. David Madigan is USC’s Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs. He oversees the overall academic enterprise of the university, including 22 of the university’s professional schools and academic units, USC Museums, and the divisions of student life, libraries, student religious and spiritual life, and enrollment services.
An internationally recognized statistics scholar with decades of leadership experience at major research universities, Provost Madigan began his role as Provost on October 13, 2026. He holds the Shelly and Ofer Nemirovsky Provost’s Chair and is an esteemed 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.
Provost Madigan came to USC after serving as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Northeastern University from 2020-2025. While serving in this capacity, he was Northeastern’s chief academic officer and led its 10 schools and colleges, research enterprises, and libraries. He also collaborated with the senior vice president for finance in order to set the university’s budget and financial priorities.
Prior to Northeastern, Provost Madigan served as executive vice president and dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Columbia University, where he oversaw five schools, 27 departments, and more than 50 research centers and institutes. He led initiatives to expand lifelong learning programs at Columbia and to make its faculty and study body more diverse. Notably, he launched a program to ensure that Columbia’s first-generation students would have the support they needed to achieve success. Previously, he also held various leadership roles and positions at Rutgers University and the University of Washington.
Provost Madigan has led large-scale global collaborations involving researchers from academic institutions, pharmaceutical companies, and government regulators in the United States and Europe. He’s currently one of the leaders of the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics program, which is composed of researchers around the world who harness the power of Big Data to study the safety and efficacy of healthcare practices. He has also previously served as editor-in-chief of Statistical Science, a review journal focused on contemporary statistical thought.
A native of Ireland, Provost Madigan received both his bachelor’s degree in mathematical sciences and his PhD in statistics from Trinity College Dublin. In his career, he has written over 200 publications in areas such as Bayesian statistics, text mining, Monte Carlo methods, pharmacovigilance, and probabilistic graphical models. He has also advised 18 PhD students. In 2012, Provost Madigan was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; he has been a leading researcher in the fields of healthcare and Big Data. For three years, he was a member of the FDA’s Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee.