McLaughlin currently serves as Georgia Tech’s provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs, a role he began after serving as dean from 2017-2020.

He first joined Tech as a member of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty in 1996. McLaughlin was the Steve Chaddick School Chair in ECE from 2012-2017, and the vice provost for International Initiatives and Steven A. Denning Chair in Global Engagement from 2007-2012.

In 2014 he co-founded CREATE-X, a campus-wide effort to instill entrepreneurial confidence in students and help them launch companies.

McLaughlin’s research interests are in the general area of communications and information theory. His research group has published in the areas of forward error correction and equalization in wireless communications, magnetic/optical data storage, data security, and privacy