Brian Fitzgerald holds an endowed professorship, the Frederick A Krehbiel II Chair in Innovation in Global Business & Technology, at the University of Limerick, Ireland, where he has also been Vice President Research from 2008-2011. He is Principal Investigator in Lero - the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, and was Founding Director of the Lero Graduate School in Software Engineering.

He was formerly at University College Cork, and has held visiting positions in Italy, Austria, Sweden, US and the UK. He holds a PhD from the University of London and his research interests lie primarily in software development, encompassing development methods, global software development, agile methods and open source software.

His publications include 12 books, and over 130 peer-reviewed articles in the leading international journals in both the Information Systems and Software Engineering fields (including IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), ACM Transactions on Software Engineering Methodology (TOSEM), Communications of the ACM, IEEE Software, IEEE Computer, Information Systems Journal, European Journal of Information Systems, Information Systems Research and MIS Quarterly).

Having worked in industry prior to taking up an academic position, he has more than 10 years’ experience in the software industry. This was gained in a variety of companies (including Citibank, eircom, IDS Computing) and in a number of countries (Ireland, Belgium, Germany).

He has been very successful in winning competitive research grants from a variety of funding agencies, including EU, Science Foundation Ireland and Enterprise Ireland. Overall, these projects have received total funding in excess of €57 million, with over €9 million received directly as Principal Investigator (PI).