Dr. Madigan is a theoretical astrophysicist (with a fondness for dinosaurs) who studies the strange orbits of icy bodies in the outer Solar System.

Born in Dublin, she was one of the first students in Ireland to receive an undergraduate degree in Astronomy (at the university of Ireland, Galway). After a year in India, she moved to the Netherlands to pursue her PhD on the motion of stars and gas around supermassive black holes.

In 2012, she was awarded a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellowship to continue her research at UC Berkeley. She joined the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2016 as an assistant professor.