Thomas W. Gilligan is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Gilligan served as the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution from the fall of 2015 through the fall of 2020. He is a scholar in economics and political science. Gilligan has had a long–standing relationship with the Hoover Institution and Stanford University serving as a Hoover national fellow in 1989–90 and a visiting faculty member at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in 1989–90 and again in 1994.
Prior to joining the Hoover Institution, Gilligan was dean of the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin, one of the largest and most distinguished business schools in the United States. Before that, Gilligan held several key administrative roles at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. Most notable positions included interim Dean, Vice Dean of Undergraduate Education, director of the Ph.D. program, and Chair of the Finance and Business Economics Department. Gilligan holds the Centennial Chair in Business Education Leadership.
Gilligan received his B.A. in 1979 at the University of Oklahoma and his Ph.D. in Economics at Washington University in 1984. He taught Economics at the California Institute of Technology (1984–1987) and during his tenure at USC he held visiting appointments at Stanford University (1989–1990 and 1994) and Northwestern University (1995–1996). He was a staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in the White House. He also served in the United States Air Force from 1972–1976.