Professor Lionel C. Briand began his role as Director of Lero and Professor of Software Engineering in University of Limerick’s Department of Computer Science and Information Systems on January 1, 2024. He has a shared appointment as professor of software engineering at the University of Ottawa, Canada. In collaboration with colleagues, over 30 years, Prof. Briand has run research projects with companies in the automotive, satellite, aerospace, energy, financial, and legal domains. He has held various engineering, academic, and leadership positions in six countries.

Prof. Briand was elevated to the grade of fellow by both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for his work on software testing and verification. He was granted the IEEE Computer Society Harlan Mills award, the ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT) outstanding research award, and the IEEE Reliability Society engineer-of-the-year award, respectively in 2012, 2022, and 2013. He further received a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant in 2016 - on the topic of modelling and testing cyber-physical systems - which is the most prestigious individual research award in the European Union and was elected a fellow of the Academy of Science, Royal Society of Canada in 2023.

Prof. Briand currently holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) on "Intelligent Software Dependability and Compliance". His research interests include: software testing and verification (including security aspects), trustworthy AI, applications of AI in software engineering, model-driven software development, requirements engineering, and empirical software engineering.

Prof. Briand earned his PhD in Computer Science in 1994 from the University of Paris Saclay, France.