I am very honored to have been elected fellow of the Academy of Science of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC).
" Recognition by the RSC for career achievement is the highest honour an individual can achieve in the Arts, Social Sciences and Sciences."
The RSC includes three academies and covers all fields of knowledge, including not only science and engineering but also humanities, arts, and social sciences. The RSC elects around 100 new fellows every year across all realms of knowledge. There are currently about 2500 fellows across the country, active or retired.
This honor is, of course, the result of many collaborations with PhD students, postdoctoral fellows, and other colleagues over the years, for which I am enormously grateful. No man is an island, as Donne’s poem says. I am also indebted to my nominator and letter writers, thanks to whom I was elected at the first attempt.
As an immigrant to Canada and Canadian since 2005, this recognition is particularly important to me. And for someone who has lived and worked in six countries, it is good to feel part of a scientific society aimed at supporting science and its impact in Canada (and worldwide).
Lionel C. Briand is professor of software engineering and has shared appointments between (1) The University of Ottawa, Canada, where he holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) and (2) Ireland's Lero Centre for Software Research, where he holds the position of Director. In collaboration with colleagues, over 30 years, he has run many collaborative research projects with companies in the automotive, satellite, aerospace, energy, financial, and legal domains. Lionel has held various engineering, academic, and leading positions in seven countries. He was one of the founders of the ICST conference (IEEE Int. Conf. on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation, a CORE A event) and its first general chair. He was also EiC of Empirical Software Engineering (Springer) for 13 years and led, in collaboration with first Victor Basili and then Tom Zimmermann, the journal to the top tier of the very best publication venues in software engineering.
Lionel was elevated to the grades of IEEE Fellow and ACM Fellow for his work on software testing and verification. He was granted the IEEE Computer Society Harlan Mills award, the ACM SIGSOFT outstanding research award, and the IEEE Reliability Society engineer-of-the-year award, respectively in 2012, 2022, and 2013. He received an 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. In 2023, he was elevated to the rank of fellow of the Academy of Science, Royal Society of Canada. He currently holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) on "Intelligent Software Dependability and Compliance". His research interests include: Trustworthy AI, software testing and verification, applications of AI in software engineering, model-driven software development, requirements engineering, and empirical software engineering.