Ever since she was a toddler taking part in on her household’s farmland in Wisconsin, Bailey Flanigan was guided by her personal selective, but wide-ranging, curiosity. Describing her younger self as spirited and a bit unruly, she directed her energies to the whole lot from constructing booby traps to doing experimental development tasks to exploring an intense curiosity in medication to writing fiction and music to planning nonprofit organizations to assist reduce social inequality.
By highschool, Flanigan was intensely drawn to explicit topics.
“I discovered myself unmotivated to take all of the AP [advanced placement] lessons for the sake of it. My curiosity was captured by lessons the place I might be creative — the place I may use math to unravel real-world issues, creatively write, make music, join distant concepts, or deeply discover the humanities — and I labored on such lessons obsessively, as a chance to discover my intuitions and pursuits,” she says. “As an alternative of becoming a member of golf equipment, I ended up spending loads of time pondering and creating by myself, and making an attempt to grasp what I loved.”
At this time Flanigan is a shared school member between the MIT Schwarzman School of Computing and the MIT departments of Political Science and Electrical Engineering and Pc Science (EECS), and a principal investigator within the MIT Laboratory for Info and Determination Methods. She has been concerned in analysis on the College of Wisconsin, the Nationwide Institutes of Well being, Google, and Carnegie Mellon, Drexel, Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford universities. Her present work focuses on utilizing computational and mathematical instruments to create new avenues for significant democratic participation.
Maybe not surprisingly, her path has crossed large expanses of material and specialties — from medication and bioengineering to public well being, and from economics to her joint appointment at MIT in laptop science and political science, which started in fall 2025.
“My trajectory throughout disciplines was only a results of me chasing down the issues I felt have been most urgent or inspiring on the time. Alongside the best way, I wound up in loads of conditions the place I used to be much less well-trained or certified in the usual methods. Whereas this was generally precarious, it was additionally extremely enjoyable, and it cultivated my means to study the languages of recent disciplines extra simply — a talent just about important to my present analysis and job.”
In faculty on the College of Wisconsin at Madison, Flanigan labored in a moist lab on therapeutic targets in most cancers and computationally on tumor genetics. She says she discovered the analysis intellectually fascinating, however ultimately started to surprise about whether or not it could have the type of affect she needed.
“On the time, I began to fret that the science I used to be creating would possibly solely, in the perfect case, be utilized by a small, comparatively rich fraction of the world, when there have been individuals affected by a lot more-preventable illnesses in a lot bigger numbers,” she says.
So Flanigan moved towards public well being, the place she researched microfluidic gadgets for HIV detection that might be utilized in low-resource settings. Nonetheless bothered by the circumstances driving these settings’ restricted assets to start with, she then began to dabble in economics.
Across the similar time, Flanigan’s tutorial advisors have been chipping away at preconceptions she held about her personal skills.
Steven Wright, a professor of legislation and creative writing at UW-Madison, served as Flanigan’s casual mentor all through faculty, and so they labored collectively on a case on the Wisconsin Innocence Venture.
“He guided me by way of my evolving pursuits in science, social inequality, and economics,” she says. “He was one of many individuals most liable for convincing me that I may goal larger in my profession, and that I may truly go to locations like MIT or Harvard.”
Additionally whereas she was in faculty, the 2 heads of the UW-Madison scholarship workplace, Debbie Berger and Julie Stubbs, despatched Flanigan repeated emails, encouraging her to use for a Goldwater Scholarship.
“I stored deleting their emails, pondering they have been spam — I didn’t suppose I used to be the type of particular person that may apply for one thing like that. Their persistence satisfied me to use, and within the course of, the horizons I perceived for myself began to alter,” she says.
After graduating from UW-Madison, Flanigan labored as a predoctoral analysis assistant in economics at Princeton. There, Professor Evita Nestoridi, now an affiliate professor at Stony Brook College, additionally supplied a pivotal second of help, letting Flanigan audit her actual evaluation class.
“Evita’s class was my first actual publicity to formal arithmetic and proofs, and I beloved it a lot that it utterly modified my profession trajectory,” Flanigan says. “Regardless of my preliminary doubts, she satisfied me that I may do math on the graduate stage; due to her encouragement, I utilized to laptop science PhD applications the next fall.”
Selecting Carnegie Mellon for her PhD, Flanigan started analysis on social alternative and democratic decision-making, serving her twin passions for technical analysis and the difficulty of “who will get what and why,” she says, quoting Nobel Prize-winning economist Al Roth.
Flanigan has developed algorithms that randomly select individuals of residents’ assemblies, designed for the frequent case the place keen individuals self-select in methods that don’t mirror the bigger inhabitants. In a coverage temporary, Flanigan gave a hypothetical instance of an meeting on synthetic intelligence, whose keen individuals would possibly skew towards youthful, extra educated residents with an curiosity in know-how, leaving different teams underrepresented regardless of their stake within the difficulty. The instruments Flanigan has developed assist steadiness illustration with such options of the choice course of as equality amongst people’ probabilities to take part, resistance to manipulation of the method, and transparency — all of which may have an effect on the overall notion of a decision-making group’s legitimacy.
Flanigan’s work is now deployed on panelot.org, a broadly used open-access web site internet hosting algorithms for randomly choosing citizen meeting individuals.
“The positioning principally walks practitioners by way of a sequence of in any other case very technical trade-offs, making these trade-offs legible after which optimizing in accordance with the priorities practitioners dictate,” she says.
Flanigan says she is motivated to enhance how the general public makes political choices, “as a result of if any political answer goes to be viable, the general public must really feel that it was arrived at by way of a reliable political course of — at the least underneath the types of authorities I discover most interesting.”
Past her work on residents’ assemblies, Flanigan’s analysis is exploring new avenues associated to extra systematically get public enter on advanced choices, and the way the format of questions we ask individuals in desire elicitation contexts can have an effect on the substance of what we conclude.
“I really feel so fortunate to be finding out these questions from inside each political science and EECS, as a result of I’ve the liberty to discover each the political and technical substance of instruments for extra direct governance as deeply as I need,” she says.
Flanigan’s curiosity-driven journey by way of broadly various terrain feels proper within the MIT surroundings, she says.
“From the start, I received this sense of belonging at MIT — like my methods of pondering and problem-solving, which had appeared peculiar in lots of conditions, truly made me belong extra,” she says. “This was a brilliant refreshing feeling, and it has been 100% borne out since I arrived.”
