LTC Nathaniel Bastian, Ph.D.

LTC Nathaniel D. Bastian, Ph.D., is an academy professor at the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point. He serves as deputy director of the Robotics Research Center (RRC), including principal investigator of the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research & Engineering (LAIRE), within the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS). Since 2023, he has dually served as program manager in the Information Innovation Office (I2O) at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Previously within EECS, he served in several roles at the Army Cyber Institute (ACI), including chief scientist, Data & Decision Sciences division chief, and chief data scientist. Before becoming an academy professor, LTC Bastian was an Operations Research / Systems Analysis (ORSA) officer with assignments as the chief artificially intelligence architect at the Department of War’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, operations research scientist at the ACI, and analytics officer at the U.S. Army Human Resources Command. Before this, he was an aeromedical evacuation officer and UH-60 Black Hawk MEDEVAC aviator with the 25th Combat Aviation Brigade. 

LTC Bastian has co-authored 200+ refereed scholarly publications, he is the recipient of numerous academic awards and honors, including a Fulbright U.S. Student Scholarship in Engineering and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and he has received a cumulative ~$8M in research grants from multiple U.S. government organizations (U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, Air Force Research Laboratory, Office of Naval Research, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, National Security Agency, Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research & Engineering, etc.). 

He is a senior member of both the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) professional societies, as well as an active member of the Military Operations Research Society (MORS), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) professional societies.