Nathaniel Bastian

Nathaniel D. Bastian, PhD, is a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army, where he is an Academy Professor at the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point. He currently 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 (D/EECS). 

Previously within D/EECS at USMA, he served in several roles at the Army Cyber Institute (ACI), including Chief Scientist, Division Chief of Data & Decision Sciences, and Chief Data Scientist. 

Before becoming an Academy Professor, LTC Bastian was an Operations Research / Systems Analysis (ORSA) Officer with assignments as the Chief Artificial Intelligence Architect at the DoD Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, Operations Research Scientist at the ACI, and Analytics Officer at the U.S. Army Human Resources Command. 

Prior to 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 100+ refereed journal articles, conference papers, book chapters, and textbooks. He is the recipient of numerous academic awards and honors, to include a Fulbright U.S. Student Scholarship in Engineering and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and he has received a cumulative $7M+ in research grants from multiple U.S. government organizations (DEVCOM, AFRL, ONR, DARPA, NSA, OUSD, etc.). 

He is a Senior Member of both INFORMS and IEEE professional societies, as well as an active member of MORS, ACM, and AAAI.