Lionel Claude Briand is a Canadian-French software engineer and computer scientist. Since January 2024 he has been professor of software engineering at the University of Limerick and director of Lero, the Irish national research centre for software. He holds a joint appointment at the University of Ottawa, where he is the Distinguished Research Chair in Trustworthy AI-Enabled Software Systems and leads the Nanda laboratory, having held a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Intelligent Software Dependability and Compliance there from 2019 to 2026.
From 2012 to 2024 Briand was a professor at the University of Luxembourg, where he headed the software verification and validation department of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) and served as the centre's vice-director from 2014 to 2019. From 2007 to 2012, he led the software verification and validation department (Certus) at Simula Research Laboratory in Oslo, Norway, in collaboration with industry partners. Further, he was a co-editor-in-chief of the journal Empirical Software Engineering (Springer) from 2004 to 2017.
His research includes Trustworthy AI, the testing, verification and validation of software systems, requirements engineering, model-driven engineering, and the application of machine learning and evolutionary computation to software engineering problems, much of it carried out in collaboration with industry.
He was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2010 and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2020, with a citation for contributions to automated software testing. He received the Harlan D. Mills Award in 2012 and the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award in 2022, and was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant in 2016. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Science of the Royal Society of Canada in 2023, a member of Academia Europaea, Informatics section, in 2025, and a member of the inaugural class of the ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Academy in 2026. Two of his papers have received the ICSE Most Influential Paper award, in 2015 and 2021.
Awards and honours
Researcher of the Year, Simula Research Laboratory, 2006, and Researcher of the Decade, 2011 Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2010 Harlan D. Mills Award, IEEE Computer Society, 2012 Engineer of the Year, IEEE Reliability Society, 2013, "for achievements in model-based software verification and testing" ICSE Most Influential Paper award, 2015 and 2021 European Research Council Advanced Grant, 2016 Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, 2020, "for contributions to automated software testing" ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award, 2022 Fellow of the Academy of Science, Royal Society of Canada, 2023 Member of Academia Europaea, Informatics section, 2025 Fellow of the International Core Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 2026 Member of the inaugural class of the ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Academy, 2026 Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association
Selected Publications
References
External links