David Bennett Madigan (born 11 December 1962) is an Irish-American statistician and academic. He is currently Provost and Senior Vice-President for Academic Affairs at Northeastern University. Previously he was Professor of Statistics at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

. From 2013 to 2018 he was also the Executive Vice-President for Arts and Sciences and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and from 2008 to 2013 he served as Chair of the Department of Statistics, both at

. He was Dean of Physical and

Mathematical Sciences The mathematical sciences are a group of areas of study that includes, in addition to mathematics, those academic disciplines that are primarily mathematical in nature but may not be universally considered subfields of mathematics proper. Statist ...

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's College, and was ...

(2005-2007), Director of the Institute of Biostatistics at

(2003-2004), and Professor in the Department of Statistics at

(2001-2007).

Education

Madigan received his bachelor's degree in Mathematics (1984, First Class Honours, Gold Medal) and a

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

in Statistics (1990), both from

Trinity College Dublin , name_Latin = Collegium Sanctae et Individuae Trinitatis Reginae Elizabethae juxta Dublin , motto = ''Perpetuis futuris temporibus duraturam'' (Latin) , motto_lang = la , motto_English = It will last i ...

. His Ph.D. thesis, titled ''An Investigation of Weights of Evidence in the Context of Probablilistic Expert Systems'', was written under the supervision of Krzysztof Mosurski.

Career

Early career

Madigan began his academic career in the 1990s at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattl ...

where he was an Assistant and then Associate Professor of Statistics. He received the University's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1995. Madigan has also served as Vice President, Data Mining, Soliloquy, Inc. (2000-2001), Principal Technical Staff Member,

AT&T Labs AT&T Labs is the research & development division of AT&T, the telecommunications company. It employs some 1,800 people in various locations, including: Bedminster NJ; Middletown, NJ; Manhattan, NY; Warrenville, IL; Austin, TX; Dallas, TX; Atla ...

-Research (1999-2000), Information Technology Consultant,

KPMG KPMG International Limited (or simply KPMG) is a multinational professional services network, and one of the Big Four accounting organizations. Headquartered in Amstelveen, Netherlands, although incorporated in London, England, KPMG is a net ...

(1989-1990), Technology Manager, Peregrine Expert Systems Ltd. (1986-1989), Expert System Consultant,

SkillSoft Skillsoft is an American educational technology company that produces learning management system software and content. History Skillsoft was founded by Charles Moran in 1998. Moran served as Chief Executive Officer and President from 1998 to 20 ...

, (1985-1986), and Actuarial Associate, Hibernian Life Assurance, Ireland (1984-1985).

Honors

Madigan is an elected Member of the International Statistical Institute (2014), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2012), a Fellow of the

Institute of Mathematical Statistics The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is an international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. The Institute currently has about 4,000 members in all parts o ...

(2006), and a Fellow of the

American Statistical Association The American Statistical Association (ASA) is the main professional organization for statisticians and related professionals in the United States. It was founded in Boston, Massachusetts on November 27, 1839, and is the second oldest continuousl ...

(1999). He has served as program co-chair for the FODS, KDD and AI-STATS conferences, Action Editor for the

Journal of Machine Learning Research The ''Journal of Machine Learning Research'' is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering machine learning. It was established in 2000 and the first editor-in-chief was Leslie Kaelbling. The current editors-in-chief are Francis Ba ...

, Editor-in-Chief of Statistical Science, and Editor-in-Chief of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining, the ASA Data Science Journal.

Scholarship

He has over 200 publications in such areas as

Bayesian statistics Bayesian statistics is a theory in the field of statistics based on the Bayesian interpretation of probability where probability expresses a ''degree of belief'' in an event. The degree of belief may be based on prior knowledge about the event, ...

text mining Text mining, also referred to as ''text data mining'', similar to text analytics, is the process of deriving high-quality information from text. It involves "the discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information, by automatically extract ...

Monte Carlo methods Monte Carlo methods, or Monte Carlo experiments, are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. The underlying concept is to use randomness to solve problems that might be determini ...

pharmacovigilance Term Given By Tushar Sharma (UPES Batch 2025) Pharmacovigilance (PV, or PhV), also known as drug safety, is the pharmaceutical science relating to the "collection, detection, assessment, monitoring, and prevention" of adverse effects with pharma ...

and probabilistic

graphical models ''Graphical Models'' is an academic journal in computer graphics and geometry processing publisher by Elsevier. , its editor-in-chief is Jorg Peters of the University of Florida. History This journal has gone through multiple names. Founded in 1 ...

. He has advised 18 Ph.D. students. In recent years he has focused on statistical methodology for generating reliable evidence from large-scale healthcare data. From 2011 to 2014 he was a member of the FDA's Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee.

Personal life

Madigan grew up in Athlone in the center of

Ireland Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe, north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel (Grea ...

where he attended the

Marist Brothers The Marist Brothers of the Schools, commonly known as simply the Marist Brothers, is an international community of Catholic religious institute of brothers. In 1817, St. Marcellin Champagnat, a Marist priest from France, founded the Marist Brothe ...

schools.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Madigan, David 1962 births Irish statisticians American statisticians Living people Alumni of Trinity College Dublin Fellows of the American Statistical Association People educated at Marist College, Athlone People from Athlone University of Washington faculty Rutgers University faculty Columbia University faculty Northeastern University faculty Bayesian statisticians