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About

I'm Nick Bailey. I work in industrial energy assessment, where the job is to walk a real facility, find where energy and money are leaking, and quantify what it is worth to fix. I do this as the lead student at the Southern New England Industrial Training and Assessment Center (SNE-ITAC), part of a U.S. Department of Energy program that sends engineering teams into small and mid-sized manufacturers.

The work runs end to end: collect field data with the right instruments (ultrasonic imagers, current and pressure transducers), model the system, calculate the savings, and write it up so a plant manager can act on it. I care most about that last part. A recommendation is only useful if the number behind it survives scrutiny, so I build the methodology to be checked, not just believed (clear assumptions, instrumented measurement, payback a client can take upstairs).

Alongside the assessment work, I'm a PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Connecticut, concentrating in information, communication, decision, and energy systems. My research applies computer vision and foundation models to drone-based inspection of photovoltaic panels, finding defects at scale in places where there is little monitoring infrastructure to catch them. (Thesis: Foundation Model Approach for Drone-Assisted Photovoltaic Panel Inspections.)

The thread connecting the floor work, the research, and the teaching I do is the same: get the analysis right, then make it legible to the person who has to decide what to do next.

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