Brian Fitzgerald is Vice-President Research at the University of Limerick, Ireland, where he holds an endowed professorship, the Frederick A. Krehbiel II Chair in Innovation in Global Business & Technology. He is a University Research Fellow, and previously led global software development research at Lero - Irish Software Engineering Research Centre (www.lero.ie), where he was also Founding Director of the Lero Graduate School in Software Engineering (www.lgsse.ie).

He was formerly at University College Cork, and has held visiting positions in Italy, Austria, Sweden, US and the UK, most recently at the University of Cambridge. 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 11 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, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering Methodology, 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 20 years experience in the software field. This industry experience was gained in a variety of companies (Citibank, eircom, IDS Computing) in a number of countries (Ireland, Belgium, Germany).

He has also been instrumental in winning competitive research funding awards from the EU, Science Foundation Ireland, Higher Education Authority (PRTLI), Enterprise Ireland and the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET). Overall, these projects have received total funding in excess of €34 million.