Gregory Bales
The thread running through twenty-five years of work is consistent. Designing the measurement system, executing the experiment, and owning the analysis from hardware decision to quantitative outcome has defined my work across aerospace actuation, precision motion control, structural dynamics, and human performance research in industry, independent practice, and academic research.
Before my doctoral research I spent over a decade in industry and independent practice across aerospace, defense, and applied engineering. At Moog CSA Engineering I designed and validated electromechanical systems including smart material actuators, active vibration control systems, and real-time embedded control architectures. At Bales Technical Service I scoped and delivered experimental platforms and prototypes for clients across aerospace actuation, production automation, and precision mechanical systems, working from ambiguous requirements through to functional hardware.
My doctoral research at UC Davis applied that same build-and-measure discipline to human performance research. I designed and constructed the sensing and motion capture infrastructure that supported a decade of human-autonomy teaming studies, then designed and executed the experiments and developed the analysis pipelines that produced peer-reviewed findings. This work combined multimodal physiological sensing, behavioral measurement, and real-time signal processing, supported by grants from NASA and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
I am looking for roles in R&D engineering, test and validation, systems engineering, or applied research where the ability to design the measurement system and own the analysis is what the role requires. If you are working on a problem that needs someone who can move from a hardware question to a data-driven answer without handing off in the middle, I would like to hear about it.
TECHNICAL CAPABILITIES
Experimental Systems Design and Integration
Designing and constructing instrumentation platforms, control systems, and integrated test environments that support rigorous measurement in operational settings. Hardware selection, system integration, calibration, and validation from concept through deployment.
Sensing and Instrumentation
Deploying and integrating multimodal measurement systems including EEG, motion capture, force and position sensing, and custom sensor assemblies to characterize human and machine performance under real operating conditions.
Data Acquisition and Quantitative Analysis
Building data acquisition pipelines and analysis workflows in Python and MATLAB that synchronize, process, and extract actionable results from high-dimensional datasets across heterogeneous sensing systems.
Electromechanical Systems and Applied Engineering
Developing precision actuators, vibration control systems, embedded control architectures, and sensing platforms for aerospace and industrial applications, from concept through prototype validation and field deployment.
Real-Time Signal Processing and State Estimation
Building computational methods that translate raw sensor data into actionable estimates of system condition, operator state, and performance outcomes in real time.
Understanding how a system actually performs requires measuring it in conditions that matter, building the tools to do that well, and turning the resulting data into something actionable. That combination applies whether the system is an autonomous platform, a manufacturing process, a sensing array, or a human operator. The domain changes. The approach does not.
Selected Projects
The projects below span experimental research, platform development, and applied engineering. Each one required building something physical, measuring something difficult, or inferring something that was not directly observable. They are collected here as evidence of what that combination looks like in practice.
Applied Engineering and Contract Work
Before and alongside my research career I have designed and built electromechanical systems for demanding applications: piezoelectric and smart material actuators for aerospace vibration control, custom sensing platforms for experimental studies, and prototype systems supporting early-stage technology development. This is not background. It is part of the work.
