Dr. Del Lucent

Associate Professor of Physics

Department of Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science

Wilkes University

Dr. Del Lucent is a lifelong Wilkes-Barre native and a first-generation college student. He earned bachelor's degrees in biology and physics from Wilkes University in 2003 and a Ph.D. in biophysics from Stanford University in 2009. At Stanford, Dr. Lucent specialized in computational physics and was involved in the Folding@home project, a distributed computing initiative aimed at solving problems in protein folding, drug design, and human health through global volunteer contributions of computing resources.

Following his graduate studies, Dr. Lucent received an Office of the Chief Executive Fellowship at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). During his fellowship, he focused on computational enzyme design and structural genomics, working on enzymes for pesticide bioremediation.

In 2012, Dr. Lucent returned to Wilkes University as a tenure-track professor of physics. He is now an associate professor in the Department of Math, Physics, and Computer Science. His research primarily addresses the physics of protein folding, protein design, and drug design, but has expanded to include deep learning, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. Dr. Lucent is one of the directors of the WARLOC supercomputer and the high-performance computing facility at Wilkes University. He is passionate about science communication and strives to make all branches of science accessible and relevant to a broad audience.