Lorraine is an Associate Professor in Business Information Systems in the School of Business & Economics and is also Associate Head of Graduate Studies. Her principal teaching and research interests focus on open innovation, open business models, crowdfunding, value networks, inner source and open source software. Lorraine is a funded investigator with Lero, the Irish Software Innovation Centre, and her work in this regard focuses on establishing an industry-focused network of excellence around open and inner source software. She is also Past-President of the Association for Information Systems Special Interest Group on Open Research and Practice (SIGOPEN), the largest founding AIS group.

She has served as General Chair for the Open Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym 2017) and the 8th Inner Source Summit (ISS 2019), as well as Organizing Chair for a number of international conferences including LESS 2013 and the 11th International Conference on Product Focused Software Development and Process Improvement (PROFES 2010.  In addition, her research has been published in journals and conferences such as Information Systems Research (ISR), European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS), Information Systems Journal (ISJ), Journal of Strategic Information Systems (JSIS), Database for Advances in Information Systems, Information and Software Technology, IEEE Computer, International Conference of Information Systems (ICIS), European Conference of Information Systems (ECIS), International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Conference 8.6 and 8.2 and the International Open Source Systems Conference.  In 2019, she was one of the recipients for the NUI Galway President’s Award for Research Excellence and in 2021 received the University of Galway President’s Award for Teaching Excellence.