Lalana is a Principal Research Scientist at MIT CSAIL and the Deputy Director of the Decentralized Information Group (DIG). She is also a Web Science Research Institute Research Fellow and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Web Semantics. Her research focuses on modeling how social norms and legal rules work in society in order to automate the compliance of policy in information systems. She is currently exploring various facets of information management and policy, such as the development of new paradigms for exploring and integrating distributed data, privacy aware querying of Big (Linked) Data, and frameworks for mobile apps for disaster management.

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.