Lucas graduated from the Animal Sciences department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014. His concentration was Pre-Veterinary Medicine, and he completed a minor in Business. He worked on a research project with Dr. Nohra Mateus-Pinilla and Dr. Jan Novakofski. The goal of this project was to look at ossification centers in the limbs of Illinois river otters in order to determine an aging method using x-rays.