Successfully Defended My Ph.D. — Call Me Dr. Lucas 🎓
I am thrilled to share that on May 11, 2026, I successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation at Penn State University!
Dissertation: Advancing Trustworthy AI Through Low-Resource Multilingual Natural Language Processing and Cybersecurity
Advisor: Dr. Dongwon Lee, College of IST, Penn State
Formal degree conferral will follow in August 2026.
This milestone represents nearly five years of work — across 14+ peer-reviewed publications, four major benchmarks (DIA-HARM, DIA-Guard, SHIELD, BLUFF), and collaborations spanning Penn State, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the University of Dublin, and partners in industry. The work was supported by the NSF NRT LinDiv fellowship and a community of mentors, collaborators, family, and friends who made the journey possible.
I am deeply grateful to:
- My advisor Dr. Dongwon Lee for his mentorship, patience, and belief in this research vision
- My dissertation committee for their rigorous feedback and guidance
- The PIKE Research Lab family — my collaborators and intellectual home for the past five years
- The College of IST and the NSF NRT LinDiv community
- My collaborators at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and Johns Hopkins CLSP
- My family in Grenada, my partner, and my friends who carried me through
This is not the end of the work — it is the foundation. Next stop: CU Boulder, where I begin as an Assistant Professor and founding Director of the Secure and Ethical AI Lab (SEAL) in August 2026.
🦬 Onward.
— Dr. Jason S. Lucas
I completed my Ph.D. in Informatics at Penn State University (defended May 2026; formal conferral August 2026), where I conducted research at the PIKE Research Lab under Dr. Dongwon Lee and the College of IST. Starting August 2026, I will join the Department of Information Science at the College of Media, Communication and Information (CMDI), University of Colorado Boulder, as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor and founding Director of the Secure and Ethical AI Lab (SEAL). My research advances trustworthy and equitable AI for the world’s languages and communities — spanning multilingual NLP, low-resource and dialectal language technology, AI safety, and information integrity, with work extending across 70+ languages. I have authored 14+ peer-reviewed papers with 315+ citations in premier venues including ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, ICML, KDD, and IEEE.
My doctoral research focuses on bridging the digital language divide through transfer learning, classification (NLU), generation (NLG), adversarial attacks, and developing end-to-end AI pipelines using RAG and Agentic AI workflows for combating multilingual threats. Drawing from my Grenadian background and knowledge of local Creole languages, I bring a global perspective to AI challenges, working to democratize state-of-the-art AI capabilities for underserved linguistic communities worldwide. My mission is to develop robust multilingual multimodal systems and mitigate evolving security vulnerabilities while enhancing access to human language technology through cutting-edge solutions.
As an NSF LinDiv Fellow, I conduct transdisciplinary research advancing human-AI language interaction for social good. I actively mentor 5+ research interns and teach Applied Generative AI courses. Through industry experience at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Interaction LLC, and Coalfire, I bridge academic research with practical applications in combating evolving security threats and enhancing global AI accessibility. I see multilingual advances and interdisciplinary collaboration as a competitive advantage, not a communication challenge. Beyond research, I stay active through dance, fitness, martial arts, and community service.