Born in the border city of Laredo in south Texas, Cigarroa graduated from J. West. Nixon High School. During his twelve years of postgraduate training, Cigarroa was chief resident at Massachusetts General Hospital ‒ the teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts ‒ and completed pediatric surgery and transplant surgery fellowships at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.
As a Mexican-American, Cigarroa is also the first Hispanic to serve as president of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA). In 1979, he earned a bachelor"s degree from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. He received his medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas in 1983.
He was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha, a national honor society for medical students, residents, scientists, and physicians in the United States and Canada.
In January 2009, Cigarroa was appointed chancellor of the University of Texas System. He is the first Hispanic to ever lead a major university system in the United States.
Before this appointment he had been the first Hispanic president of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. On July 1, 2010, Cigarroa began serving an elected six-year term as an Alumni Fellow to the Yale Corporation, the governing body of Yale University.
In August 2011, Cigarroa presented to the University Board of Regents his Framework for Excellence designed to make the University of Texas System one of the top-ranked United States educational systems of higher learning.
The framework was unanimously approved by the Board of Regents and has since received national acclaim. In December 2011, Cigarroa was invited to the White House to share his program with United States President Barack Obama and United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. On February 10, 2014, Cigarroa announced his resignation from the Utah System.
Records obtained by the Austin American-Statesman show that Cigarroa as the Utah System chancellor, dispatched letters of recommendation from influential people to William C. Powers, the president of Utah in Austin, which urge admission of some forty students to the institution.
Sometimes Cigarroa placed handwritten notes on the letters about the prominence of the person making the request for admission. Often those given consideration were related to large donors to the university.
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
