Phillip M. Lacasse

LTC Phillip M. Lacasse serves as an Assistant Professor of Operations Research in the Department of Operational Sciences at the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT), assigned under a formal Memorandum of Agreement between AFIT and the U.S. Army Functional Area 49 Proponent Office. As an active-duty U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel, his military career includes tank and scout platoon leadership, company command during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and staff roles at USMEPCOM and West Point.

His academic credentials include:

• B.S. in Mathematics from United States Military Academy
• M.S. in Industrial Engineering from University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Ph.D. in Engineering from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Dr. Lacasse's research integrates Operations Research, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing to solve defense and industrial challenges. His work demonstrates expertise in autonomous swarm behavior for anti-access environments, emotion classification in multilingual social media, and workforce optimization for military applications. Recent publications reveal a strong focus on simulation modeling for military processing systems and defect prediction in smart manufacturing.

His scholarly output shows consistent application of advanced analytics to real-world problems, particularly in military logistics (e.g., applicant scheduling simulations) and industrial systems (e.g., PCB defect prediction). Key trends include leveraging large language models for linguistic tasks and developing optimization frameworks for Army force structure analysis.