I am a funded Investigator in Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software and have received the NSAI 1997 Award and the Dundalk Institute of Technology President’s Award for Early Career Researcher.  My research has delivered impact  through international collaboration and multidisciplinary cross faculty engagement at a local level. I have directly trained Clinical and IT personnel on medical IT network best practice I have an established network of international research collaborators in 8 countries (including the US, Australia, and Germany) and additionally with various Irish Universities. I have been an invited speaker/keynote at national and international conferences/events; and reviewer/Programme Committee member for leading international conferences and journals. Iam currently serving as Chair of the National Standards Authority of Ireland Health Informatics Standards Committee having acted as Vice Chair since 2019. I am an invited member of the NSAI Top Team for AI Standards providing recommendations to the Department of the Taoiseach through the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. I am a long term contributor (10+ years) to the ISO and IEC including as project leader and editor and have served as General Chair for conferences/think tank sessions including the Health Identifiers Conference, 2016. I have a strong track record of research student supervision and regular Examiner/Chair for DCU School of Computing Vivas/Transfer Talks. I am an active member of the School of Commuting Ethics Committee since 2019 and have represented Lero Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software on the Faculty of Engineering and Computing Faculty Committee for Research (FEC) since 2020.

 My research interests include:

1. Health Information Technology Systems
2. Education of Autistic Software Engineers
3. Software Testing in Safety Critical Domains
4. Software Engineering Best Practice

Each of these areas are closely aligned with DCU and School of Computing strategies. A brief overview of exach area is provided below:

Research Focus 1. Health Information Technology Systems My first area of research is the development and implementation of standards for risk management of health information technology systems (HITS). My ultimate goal is to develop meaningful approaches to standards development to ensure that stakeholder interests are represented as a means to drive the adoption of standards that promote safe, effective and secure health information technology systems. I am particularly interested in methods, techniques, tools and standards for managing the risks of implementing and maintaining information technology systems particularly in the healthcare domain. My research focuses on using a pragmatic approach to the development of a standard based approach to risk management of networked medical devices and health information technology systems.

Research Focus 2. Education of Autistic Software Engineers I am passionately committed to advancing the opportunities for autistic individuals in the software industry. My research will focus on gaining an understanding of how the educational experience of autistic computing students can be enhanced to ensure that they are best prepared for a role in the software industry and how industry can retain employees with autism within their roles and can leverage this previously untapped talent. Cognitively diverse teams lead to better problem solving and innovation which is especially necessary for software development teams and the complex, continuously-changing technology industry. In alignment with the Research and Innovation Strategy, the proposed research will require close engagement with enterprise to develop innovative approaches to the recruitment of autistic individuals which will deliver societal impact through the creation of neurodiverse teams capable of addressing the complex challenges of developing the increasingly complex IT systems required by society and economic impact both at the level of software development organisations through addressing the skills gap and at the level of autistic individuals by ensuring that they can access and retain rewarding roles in the software development domain.

Research Focus 3. Software Testing in Safety Critical Domains Research focus 3 aligns my research in the area of standards development and implementation with my previous industry experience in software testing. My goal through this research focus is to leverage existing standards based best practice for software testing and apply to the domain of medical device software testing. In order to place a medical device onto the market, the manufacturers must show that the device is compliant with the relevant regulation. The main way in which medical device manufacturers do this is through the implementation of Harmonised Standards. However, the standards for medical device software development discuss software development processes and do not explicitly outline how software testing should be conducted. As such, the focus of this research is to combine consensus best practice for software testing taken from generic software testing standards and integrate these processes and principles into the software development processes outlines in medical device software standards.   

Research Focus 4. Software Engineering Best Practice Software Engineering Best Practice has underpinned the research described above and continues to be a focus for further research. The development of the framework for the assessment of the capability of risk management processes for Medical IT Networks used standards for Software Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination (SPICE) to provide a methodology for the development of the framework. This research continues to underpin the development of future assessment frameworks in this area such as the HITS framework proposed in Research Plan- Research Focus 1. This research is aligned with the course content for CA348 Business Information Management and CA4101 Enterprise Architecture modules, which both discuss how organisations can used capability maturity assessment in order to deliver on organisational strategy and looks at other Quality Management System standards e.g. ISO 9000.