Governance Committee
The Lero Governance Committee works with the Lero management to ensure that the centre operates in line with its strategy and the expectations of SFI and to provide an informed, external perspective on the strategic activities of Lero. This includes awareness of best practice across centres, of industry priorities and constraints, and of state agency perspectives. It meets three times per year and reports to the President of UL. Members include:
Aongus Hegarty (Chairman)
Co-Chair Balance for Better Business
Aongus Hegarty is a seasoned board member and strategic advisor, with four decades of global business experience. He recognises the connected role between people, business, and technology in driving growth and innovation. At Dell Technologies, Aongus held several executive roles, most recently as President for International Markets, an organisation spanning over 170 countries. He also led the company’s SME business globally and was instrumental in driving strategic initiatives and growth with Dell’s channel and distribution partners.
Renowned for his insights on leadership, digital transformation, and sustainability, Aongus is also an advocate for entrepreneurship and diversity and inclusivity. Recognising this, the Irish Government appointed Aongus as Co-Chair of the Balance for Better Business (B4BB) initiative, promoting increased female representation on company boards.
An alumnus of the University of Limerick, Aongus was honoured with the Alumni Award for Outstanding Achievement in 2013. He holds a fellowship from both the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) and the Irish Management Institute (IMI), the latter presenting a life fellowship upon him in 2019.
Prof. Lionel Briand
Centre Director
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.
Prof. Kevin M. Ryan
Vice President Research and Innovation
Professor Kevin M Ryan was appointed Vice President Research and Innovation at UL in January 2025.
Kevin Ryan is a full Professor of Chemical Nanotechnology at the School of Chemical Sciences and Chemical Engineering at the University of Limerick and is the outgoing Director of the Bernal Institute. A native of Limerick, he graduated with a BSc in 1999 and a PhD in 2003 in Chemistry from University College Cork.
He held Marie Curie Fellowship positions at Merck Chemicals Southampton, UK, and at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, before joining the University of Limerick in 2006 as a Marie Curie return fellow.
He obtained a Science Foundation Ireland Stokes lectureship in 2008, was promoted to Senior lecturer in 2013, and Personal Chair in 2018. From 2019-2022, he was an elected member of the Governing Authority of the University. He also served as course director for Pharmaceutical and Industrial Chemistry for 8 years (2010-2018).
Kevin’s research group, based in the Bernal Institute, emphasizes advanced materials development for rechargeable batteries, focusing on performance gains from incorporating nanomaterials as active components. He has published over 200 research papers, holds 10 patents, and has graduated 26 PhD students. He has secured over €12 million in individual research funding from National, EU, and Industry sources. He coordinated large Horizon 2020 consortium projects, including Neillsbat and Si-Drive, achieving significant gains in energy density by incorporating silicon nanowires developed at UL as the anode for lithium-ion batteries. He currently leads the SIGNE Horizon Europe project, scaling a silicon graphite composite to the battery pack level for electric vehicles with 16 academic and industry partners, including Analog Devices, Ferrari, Stellantis, Solvionic, and Delfort. Nationally, he has secured three prestigious SFI Investigator Awards. He is an awardee of the Irish Research Council Laureate in the Advanced Category and a co-principal investigator on Research Ireland centers AMBER & MaREI. He sits on the advanced materials working group for the Batteries European Partnership Association (BEPA). His publications can be found at https://pure.ul.ie/en/persons/kevin-m-ryan .
Prof. Chris Johnson
Pro Vice Chancellor – Engineering and Physical Sciences, Queens University
Chris Johnson is Pro Vice Chancellor for Engineering and Physical Sciences at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is a systems engineer focussing on safety and security. He has held fellowships with NASA, US Air Force, US Navy and the FAA and serves as a founding member of the Scientific Advisory Board on the future of European Air Traffic Management (EC SESAR JU) for more than a decade; a role which has been extended after Brexit. In 2021, he is helping provide safety/security assurance arguments for the launch of (one of) the UK’s first Quantum Key distribution satellites and is one of seventeen expert witnesses to the Public Inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Aeronautical Society and the British Computer Society.
Prof. Conor Ryan
Co-Principal Investigator
Professor Conor Ryan is Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Limerick. He was awarded his PhD in Genetic Programming, a style of Machine Learning, in 1996, and was the inventor, along with two of his PhD students, of Grammatical Evolution, in 1998. Grammatical Evolution is the most commonly used non-patented Evolutionary Automatic Programming system in the world, and has spawned thousands of publications since its inception. Conor was a Fulbright Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in 2013-2014. He holds several granted patents in the use of Machine Learning to extend the life and reliability of Flash Memory and Solid State Disks (SSDs), and was the co-founder of two companies, Evolvability and NVMdurance, both of which are located in Limerick. Conor’s research group, the Biocomputing and Developmental Systems (BDS) group, within Lero conducts research into areas such as Machine Learning, Evolutionary Computation and the application of these techniques to large scale problems, such as mammography.
Chris Chedgey
CEC of Structure101
Chris has a Masters in Software Engineering from Trinity College Dublin, with over 25 years software engineering experience gained in Ireland, Canada and the United States.
Chris joined the International Space Station Project in 1990 where he was a member of the team that defined the software development processes and tools for the program, and then technical lead on the Remote Manipulator System control software. In 1994 he moved to the $1.5bn Iris program which replaced the entire communications systems for the Canadian armed forces, first on the process/toolsmithing side, and then the product development side. In 2000 he founded Headway Software to address the lack of large-scale modularity that he saw as pervasive in software industry.
He lives on the south coast of Ireland, where he likes to sail when it’s windy, and walk the dog when it’s not.
Prof. Sinead Ryan
Dr. Eucharia Meehan
CEO & Registrar of DIAS
Dr. Eucharia Meehan is the CEO & Registrar of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS). DIAS, one of a family of international independent research institutes, focuses on fundamental research in designated disciplines – #DIASdiscovers (www.dias.ie). Prior to joining DIAS (2017), Eucharia was the inaugural Director of the Irish Research Council (IRC), the latter being established in 2012 through the merger of two former councils IRCSET and IRCHSS. Prior to that she was Head of Research and Innovation (policy and investment) at the HEA. This latter role encompassed Director of the Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions (PRTLI – an investment of €1.2bn to develop strategic research infrastructure and capacity). Prior to 2002, she was Head of Programme Management for Elan Biotechnology Research (EBR).
Anna-Marie Turley
Department Manager, Entrepreneurship & HPSU Operations at Enterprise Ireland
Anna-Marie is Head of Entrepreneurship & HPSU Operations in Enterprise Ireland. Her previous role was Manager of the Retail, Consumer & Online Department and prior to that she worked as a Senior Development Adviser across the organisation. Prior to Enterprise Ireland, Anna-Marie worked in industry for over 10 years and has considerable experience in a variety of industry sectors, most notably ICT, both in Irish early stage start-up companies and globally trading multinational businesses including Ericsson, Dell and Smurfit. Additional responsibilities include serving on the Enterprise Ireland’s Financial Products Committee, the Equity Review Committee. She is a member of the Irish Photonic Integration Centre (IPIC) Governance Committee and the NSAI IoT and Digital Twin Committee. As part of her wider commitment to developing innovation and entrepreneurship in society, Anna-Marie is a regular judge at the BT Young Scientist, Ireland’s premier science competition for school children and has recently been appointed to serve as a member on the Council of Gaisce. A native of Monaghan, Anna-Marie holds a B.Sc. (Hons) in Computer Science, an MBS in Management Information Systems from the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School and a MSc in Business Practice from the IMI.
John Durcan
IDA, Senior Technologist – Research, Development & Innovation