Madigan received his bachelor's degree in mathematics (1984, First Class Honours, Gold Medal) and a Ph.D. in statistics (1990), both from Trinity College Dublin. 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.[5]
Career
Early career
Madigan began his academic career in the 1990s at the University of Washington where he was an Assistant and then Associate Professor of Statistics. He received the University's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1995.[6] Madigan has also served as Vice President, Data Mining, Soliloquy, Inc. (2000-2001), Principal Technical Staff Member, AT&T Labs-Research (1999-2000), Information Technology Consultant, KPMG (1989-1990), Technology Manager, Peregrine Expert Systems Ltd. (1986-1989), Expert System Consultant, SkillSoft, (1985-1986), and Actuarial Associate, Hibernian Life Assurance, Ireland (1984-1985).[citation needed]
He has over 200 publications[13] in such areas as Bayesian statistics, text mining, Monte Carlo methods, pharmacovigilance and probabilistic graphical models. He has advised 18 Ph.D. students.[14] In recent years he has focused on statistical methodology for generating reliable evidence from large-scale healthcare data.[15] From 2011 to 2014 he was a member of the FDA's Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee.[16]