Professor of Operations Research
Ph.D., University of California at Riverside, 1991

Thomas W. Lucas is a Professor of Operations Research at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey California. He has been at NPS since 1998. Previously, he worked for six years as a statistician and project leader at RAND and for eleven years as a systems engineer at Hughes Aircraft Company. His primary research interests are simulation, warfare analysis, design of experiments, and robust Bayesian statistics. In addition to his regular faculty duties, Professor Lucas was a co-founder and co-director of NPS' SEED Center for Data Farming (see https://www.nps.edu/web/seed/) from 2006 to 2023. SEED is an acronym for Simulation Experiments and Efficient Design. The Center's mission is to advance the collaborative development and use of simulation experiments and efficient designs to provide decision makers with timely insights on complex systems and operations. The Center specializes in enabling small teams of analysts and subject matter experts to quickly conduct computational experiments on existing or proposed organizations and systems, with an emphasis on national security issues.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

• Robust Statistical Methodology
• Defense and Security Modeling
• High-dimensional Design of Experiments