Lucas was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He majored in Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and obtained his Ph.D. at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He was a Hubble and Goldberg fellow at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, AZ before moving to Texas A&M. He has studied Cepheid variables in nearby spiral galaxies as part of several projects aimed at measuring the expansion rate of the Universe (the Hubble constant) with increasingly higher accuracy and precision.