David McLaughlin was appointed Provost in May 2002.

As Provost, McLaughlin serves as NYU's most senior academic officer. His goals as Provost include making academic priorities a central component of every administrative decision at the University, and engaging the faculty actively in these decision processes.

McLaughlin is a professor of mathematics and neural science, and an adjunct professor of biomathematics at the Mt. Sinai Medical School. Prior to his position as Provost, he was the director of NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences from 1994-2002. Previously, he was the director of the program in applied and computation mathematics at Princeton University, having joined the faculty there in 1989. After beginning his career in 1970 as an assistant professor of mathematics at the Heights campus of NYU, he joined the faculty of Iowa State University, and in 1974, he joined the faculty of the University of Arizona, where he was chairman of the program in applied mathematics.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the author of more than 100 papers and articles, an editor of two books, and a member of the editorial boards of numerous journals of applied mathematics and nonlinear science. Currently, he is chairman of the activities group on dynamical systems for the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He was a recipient of the Lester Ford Award from the American Mathematical Society in 1976, was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1994, and was the recipient of the David Alcaraz Spinola Award from the University of Mexico in 1995. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

McLaughlin received his B.S. (1966), magna cum laude, from Creighton University, and M.S. (1969) and Ph.D. (1971) from Indiana University.