Prof. Lionel Briand has been appointed Vice-director of the SnT with special responsibility for scientific excellence and impact by the President of the University of Luxembourg, Prof. Rolf Tarrach, and the Director of SnT, Prof. Björn Ottersten. Along with Profs. Björn Ottersten and Thomas Engel, Lionel Briand is therefore the third member of SnT's directorate.

"Lionel Briand brings vast experience from working across several countries and continents to assist in the next phase of the Centre's development", says Björn Ottersten: "As the most highly-cited scientist in Luxembourg, he is in an excellent position to advance and promote the SnT's scientific goals, both nationally and internationally." Lionel Briand states that "the SnT, clearly one of the most successful research units in Luxembourg, hired many talented scientists and students and, in a very short time, acquired a strong international reputation in many areas of information and communication technology. I am therefore very excited to be given the chance to promote research excellence and impact within SnT, and to help bring the Centre to the next level of excellence."

Lionel Briand joined SnT in 2012 to head the research group on Software Verification and Validation (SVV). His expertise areas are software verification and validation, software testing, model-driven requirements, architecture and design. He is recipient of an FNR PEARL grant, amounting to five million euros over five years. Prof. Briand is an IEEE Fellow, a former Canada Research Chair, a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society's Harlan Mills Award (2012) and the IEEE Reliability Society's engineer-of-the-year award (2013).

Over the years, he held the following positions:

• Head of the Certus center for software verification and validation, Simula Research Laboratory, Norway
• Professor, University of Oslo, Norway
• Professor and Canada Research Chair, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
• Department Head, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany
• Group Leader, Computer Research Institute of Montreal (CRIM), Montreal, Canada
• Faculty Research Scientist, SEL, University of Maryland and NASA GSFC, College Park, Maryland, USA
• Software Engineer, CISI Ingenierie, France