Nick Kelly

Role: Faculty

Nicholas A. Kelly is a data scientist and lead architect of the NHA eLibrary at the National Hydropower Association. A graduate of George Mason University with a B.S. in Computational and Data Sciences, he specializes in applied AI systems for large-scale regulatory analysis. He designed the NHA eLibrary as a production-grade research platform for exploring more than 1,800 NEPA documents across 984 hydropower projects, representing over 100 million words of preprocessed environmental review text. The system integrates SQL-based database management, a three-stage retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) engine combining semantic and structured search, and a statistical analysis and data visualization suite to measure agency involvement, policy co-occurrence, project costs, and licensing timelines. By unifying document exploration, quantitative analysis, and AI-assisted document review, Kelly’s work transforms complex hydropower licensing records into an evidence-driven intelligence tool for policy evaluation, stakeholder advocacy, and data-informed reform.