Aimee Bailey

About Aimee

updated 6/2013: Aimee Gotway Bailey grew up in a small farming community in rural Illinois, nestled between the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. She pursued a bachelor’s degree in materials engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where she contributed to multiple research programs, including an experimental chemistry group studying hydrogen storage, an experimental materials group investing thin films to coat implants to enhance biocompatibility, a theoretical materials group investigating the mechanical behavior of a candidate material for the containment walls of the ITER fusion reactor, and an applied physics group engineering photonic crystal devices capable of remote chemical detection. Aimee continued her education in the Department of Physics at Imperial College London, where she completed her doctoral dissertation on the simulation of soft matter systems. Applications of her research include flow properties of petrochemicals, microorganism motility, and the organization of intra-cellular components. After completing her thesis, she took a post-doctoral position researching biochemical networks at the Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (FOM Institute AMOLF) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. There, Aimee investigated the Ras biochemical network, which is a group of proteins implicated in cancerous cells. In the fall of 2010, she entered the Solar Energy Technologies Program (aka SunShot Initiative) at the U.S. Department of Energy as a Science & Technology Policy Fellow sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. There she researched the process of technology evolution, insight from which will guide billions of dollars of federal research and development investments in energy generation technologies.
Currently, Aimee is in Beijing at the Global Environmental Institute as a 2012-2013 Luce Scholar, where she is writing a groundbreaking white paper on the prospects of crowdfunding playing a significant role in sustainable development in China. This type of community-based approach to project finance will be instrumental in assisting regions in China to successfully tackle environmental and economic challenges in a socially cognizant manner. As a component of the research, she is leading a pilot project crowdfunding the costs for beehives to scale up a honey cooperative in rural Sichuan Province near the Fengtongzhai Nature Reserve, to promote bioconservation by providing alternative livelihoods to rural residents. In her free time, Aimee enjoys traveling, brewing beer, making stained glass windows, and spending time with family, friends, and her pit bull mix, Flora.