Lalana is a Research Scientist at MIT CSAIL, where she works with the Decentralized Information Group (DIG) group. Her current research focus is on policy-based frameworks and protocols for security and privacy on the Web and on improving transparency and accountability of knowledge inference across heterogeneous information systems.

She is a former postdoctoral associate at MIT and was supervised by Tim Berners-Lee. She received PhD (advisor Tim Finin) and M.S. degrees from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County where she worked with the Ebiquity group on various aspects of trust, security, and general policy management in dynamic distributed environments including the Semantic Web, multi-agent systems, and pervasive computing systems. Her thesis involved developing Rei, a policy language for distributed system management, which is expressed in RDF/XML and is a rule extension of OWL.