Scott Lucero

dslucero@vt.edu

Scott Lucero

Senior Research Associate, Intelligent Systems Division

Scott Lucero is senior research associate in the Intelligent Systems Division of the Virginia Tech National Security Institute. Lucero is a systems engineer who recently retired from civil service with 36 years’ experience in the U.S. Department of Defense. As a contractor, for the past year and a half, he provided systems engineering support to DARPA and most recently, DoD’s Space Development Agency, with a focus on using commercial GEOINT satellites to maintain 24x7 allweather coverage of time-sensitive targets.

He is a distinguished guest lecturer at Defense Acquisition University and holds DAWIA Level III certifications in Program Management, Test and Evaluation, Information Technology, as well as Engineering. He holds one patent and has published poetry as well as several research papers in peer-reviewed journals.

Lucero worked in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering as the Director of Systems Engineering Transformation. Scott was the Government’s Program Manager for the Systems Engineering Research Center, a consortium of the nation’s leading universities conducting research in systems engineering. 

Lucero also served as the program manager of the National Security Engineering Center, a Federally Funded Research and Development Center run by the MITRE Corporation, and as the Deputy Director for Software Engineering in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He has led teams charged with systems engineering and test oversight for DoD’s major Command and Control, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance systems. He is credited with saving over $5 billion by providing a sound analytic basis to reject the flawed software acquisition strategy for a major defense acquisition. He played a key role in reinvigorating the Department’s systems engineering efforts, beginning in 2003. 

Lucero also served on the headquarters staff of the Army’s Test and Evaluation Command, leading the Army’s software measurement and testing efforts. He led the team that did the first operational tests of Army business systems. Lucero began his career with the Army’s Computer Systems Command working on software performance modeling and software quality assurance metrics for the Army’s business systems. 

Lucero has a B.S. and M.S.  in computer science and is working on a PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech.