Nathaniel Bastian

Dr. Nathaniel D. Bastian joined DARPA in August 2023 as a program manager to develop, execute, and transition programs in artificial intelligence (AI) and cyber operations. As a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, he serves as an academy professor at the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point and a cyber warfare officer. His research focus areas span the security, assurance and robustness of AI systems, AI for autonomous cyber decision-support, intelligent battlefield command and control systems, data security and alternative computing, cognitive security, and cyber-human systems engineering.

Bastian joins DARPA from the Army Cyber Institute (ACI) within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at USMA, where he serves as division chief, Data & Decision Sciences, and senior research scientist. His extensive portfolio focuses on researching and developing intelligent, assured, human-aware, data-centric, and decision-driven capabilities that enable information advantage and decision dominance for multi-domain operations across the complex, contested, congested, and evolving battlefield. He also teaches operations research, data science, statistics, and systems engineering as faculty in both the Department of Systems Engineering and the Department of Mathematical Sciences.

Prior to becoming an academy professor, Bastian served as an operations research/systems analysis officer with assignments as the chief AI architect at the DoD Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, operations research scientist at the ACI/USMA, and analytics officer at the U.S. Army Human Resources Command. He also previously served as an aeromedical evacuation officer and UH-60 helicopter pilot with the 25th Combat Aviation Brigade, including a year-long deployment supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

Bastian holds a doctorate in industrial engineering and operations research from Pennsylvania State University (PSU), a Master of Engineering in industrial engineering from PSU, a Master of Science in econometrics and operations research from Maastricht University, and a Bachelor of Science in engineering management (electrical engineering) with honors from USMA. He was a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow, a Fulbright U.S. student fellow to the Netherlands, and served on DARPA’s Information Science and Technology Study Group. He also served as a distinguished visitor professor at the National Security Agency and a visiting research fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. He is an active member of INFORMS, MORS, IEEE, ACM, and AAAI. His work has been included in more than 100 journal articles, conference papers, and books.