Academic biography

Regina Connolly is Professor of Information Systems and Head of the Enterprise and Innovation Group at Dublin City University Business School.  Her research focuses on Public Sector digital transformation and her work has guided government national policy.  She previously served as Deputy Vice-President for Research & Innovation for the university and also served for 4 terms as Director of the award-winning Masters in Electronic Commerce programme, which she successfully led through 2 EPAS accreditations. Recently, she led DCU Business School's successful application for Athena SWAN Bronze accreditation.  In her undergraduate degree she received the Kellogg Award for outstanding dissertation and in 1997 was awarded an MSc degree with distinction. Her PhD in Information Systems was awarded by Trinity College, Dublin and she was an Invited Visiting Professor at Oxford University in 2009-2010 and is Professor Invité at H.E.C European Business School, Paris. Her external PhD examiner appointments include the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, University College Cork, University of Galway and she has served as external examiner for MIS programmes at UCD and UCC. 

A regular speaker both in Ireland and internationally, she has presented on Connected Health Business Models at the European Parliament. She served on the expert eCommerce advisory group for Dublin Chamber of Commerce, which advised national government on eCommerce strategic planning.  In 2014 she was appointed by the European Foundation for Management Development to their EPAS Business School accreditation review panel.  

Professor Connolly is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Internet Commerce. She has served for 2 terms as Associate Editor of the European Journal of Information Systems; is Senior Editor of Information Systems Management; Associate Editor of the International Journal of Advanced Decision Sciences and Associate Editor of the Journal of Electronic Commerce in Organizations.  She has been a member of the Governing Council of the Irish Academy of Management and is a funded investigator with LERO, the SFI funded Irish Software Research Centre.  

Her research work is highly regarded and has been recognised with several international awards and distinctions including Government Information Quarterly's Best Research Paper of the year award, the Villanova University Research Excellence Award of Merit, as well as multiple Best Paper Awards. Her academic papers have been published in top ranked international journals including Management Information Systems Quarterly (FT50), Journal of the Association for Information Systems,  European Journal of Information Systems, Journal of Information Technology, Information Systems Journal, Government Information Quarterly, Information Polity and Information Systems Management.   In 2019, she was winner of the Inaugural DCU President’s Award for Research Impact and also received the Lero Research Diversity and Inclusion Award.  

Her research is consistently successful in securing large scale EU H2020 funding: 5,900,000 in 2020; €2,785,000 in 2019; €4,500,000 in 2016; €3,760,000 in 2015;  and €4,899,080 and €3,380,000 for two separate H2020 projects in 2014, in addition to funding from industry and the Irish Research Council.  In 2008, Professor Connolly was appointed by the Minister for Health and Children to the Medical Council of Ireland. She currently serves as a Non-Executive Director of the National Orthopaedic Hospital of Ireland, Clontarf and in 2018 was appointed as Deputy Chair of the hospital's Board of Governors.