[3] Lucas was born in the United States but raised from ages five through twenty-one in Guatemala City and in Rome, Italy.
[2] During her tenure at Gallaudet, Lucas served as principal investigator on two research projects in the field of sign language linguistics.
(Results of its pilot study are discussed in the introductory chapter of Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities (Lucas 1995).)
The second project became titled The History and Structure of Black ASL (funded by The Spencer Foundation and NSF, Grant Numbers: BCS-0813736, DRL-0936085).
[5] The results of this study are summarized in the book The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL: Its History and Structure (McCaskill et al. 2011).