Key Takeaways
- Bailey Flanigan’s childhood curiosity drove her to explore a wide range of interests, from building booby traps to writing fiction and planning nonprofits.
- In high school she gravitated toward classes that allowed creative problem‑solving, preferring self‑directed projects over traditional extracurriculars.
- She now holds a joint faculty appointment at MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing, Political Science, and EECS, focusing on computational tools for democratic participation.
- Her career path reflects a deliberate chase of pressing problems, leading her across medicine, public health, economics, and computer science.
- Early research experiences—including a cancer wet lab and microfluidic HIV detection—prompted her to question the societal impact of narrowly focused science.
- Mentors such as Steven Wright, Debbie Berger, Julie Stubbs, and Evita Nestoridi were pivotal in expanding her self‑perception and encouraging prestigious scholarships and graduate study.
- A formal mathematics course at Princeton sparked her confidence to pursue graduate‑level math and computer science.
- During her PhD at Carnegie Mellon she designed algorithms for fair, transparent citizen‑assembly selection, now hosted on the open‑access site panelot.org.
- Flanigan’s ongoing work investigates how question framing and public‑input mechanisms affect the legitimacy of political decisions.
- She describes MIT as an environment where her unconventional way of thinking finally feels like a natural fit.
Early Life and Curiosity
Ever since she was a child playing on her family’s farmland in Wisconsin, Bailey Flanigan was guided by her own selective, yet wide‑ranging, curiosity. She described her young self as spirited and a bit unruly, directing her energies toward everything from building booby traps and doing experimental construction projects to exploring an intense interest in medicine, writing fiction and music, and planning nonprofit organizations aimed at lessening social inequality. This eclectic mix of activities laid the foundation for a lifelong habit of jumping between disciplines whenever a problem captured her imagination.
High School Focus and Self‑Directed Learning
By high school, Flanigan became intensely drawn to particular subjects that allowed her to be creative. She found herself unmotivated to take all the AP classes merely for prestige; instead, she gravitated toward courses where she could use math to solve real‑world problems, write creatively, make music, connect distant ideas, or deeply explore the humanities. Rather than joining clubs, she spent much of her time thinking and creating on her own, trying to understand what she truly enjoyed and how she could apply her varied interests to meaningful work.
Current Role at MIT and Research Focus
Today Flanigan holds a shared faculty position between the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the MIT departments of Political Science and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). She is also a principal investigator in the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. Her current research centers on using computational and mathematical tools to create new avenues for meaningful democratic participation, seeking to improve how collective decisions are made and perceived by the public.
Interdisciplinary Trajectory and Learning New Disciplines
Perhaps not surprisingly, her career has crossed huge expanses of subject matter—from medicine and bioengineering to public health, economics, and a joint appointment in computer science and political science that began in fall 2025. Flanigan explains that this trajectory resulted from chasing down the problems she felt were most pressing or inspiring at each moment. Although she sometimes entered fields where she was less formally trained, she found the experience fun and it cultivated her ability to quickly learn the “languages” of new disciplines—a skill she deems essential to her present research and job.
Undergraduate Research at UW‑Madison
In college at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Flanigan worked in a wet lab on therapeutic targets in cancer and, on the computational side, studied tumor genetics. She found the research intellectually interesting but began to wonder whether it would have the impact she desired. She worried that the science she was developing might only benefit a small, relatively wealthy fraction of the world, while larger numbers of people suffered from more‑preventable diseases. This concern prompted her to look beyond the lab for ways to address broader social inequities.
Shift to Public Health and Early Economics
Flanigan moved toward public health, where she researched microfluidic devices for HIV detection that could be deployed in low‑resource settings. Still bothered by the underlying circumstances that limited resources in those settings, she began to dabble in economics to understand the structural drivers of inequality. Around the same time, her academic advisors helped her reconsider preconceived notions about her own abilities, opening her mind to higher aspirations.
Mentorship and Scholarship Encouragement
Steven Wright, a professor of law and creative writing at UW‑Madison, served as an informal mentor throughout college. Together they worked on a case at the Wisconsin Innocence Project, and Wright guided Flanigan through her evolving interests in science, social inequality, and economics, convincing her that she could aim for institutions like MIT or Harvard. Additionally, the two heads of the UW‑Madison scholarship office, Debbie Berger and Julie Stubbs, repeatedly emailed her about applying for a Goldwater Scholarship. Initially dismissing the messages as spam, Flanigan eventually applied, and the process broadened the horizons she perceived for herself.
Predoctoral Experience at Princeton
After graduating from UW‑Madison, Flanigan worked as a predoctoral research assistant in economics at Princeton. There, Professor Evita Nestoridi—now an associate professor at Stony Brook University—allowed Flanigan to audit her real analysis class. Flanigan describes this as her first real exposure to formal mathematics and proofs, an experience she loved so much that it completely changed her career trajectory. Nestoridi’s encouragement convinced Flanigan that she could succeed in graduate‑level math, leading her to apply to computer science PhD programs the following fall.
PhD Work at Carnegie Mellon and Democratic Tools
Choosing Carnegie Mellon for her PhD, Flanigan began research on social choice and democratic decision‑making, driven by her dual passions for technical research and the question of “who gets what and why,” a phrase she attributes to Nobel laureate Al Roth. She developed algorithms that randomly select participants for citizens’ assemblies, addressing the common issue where willing participants self‑select in ways that do not mirror the broader population. In a policy brief, she gave a hypothetical example of an AI‑focused assembly whose volunteers might skew younger, more educated, and tech‑enthusiastic, leaving other stakeholder groups under‑represented. Her tools balance representation with equality of chance, resistance to manipulation, and transparency—factors that influence the perceived legitimacy of decision‑making bodies. These algorithms are now deployed on panelot.org, an open‑access website that walks practitioners through technical trade‑offs, makes them legible, and optimizes according to user‑specified priorities.
Motivation, Broader Research, and Sense of Belonging
Flanigan says she is motivated to improve how the public makes political decisions because she believes any viable political solution must be seen as arising from a legitimate process—particularly under the forms of government she finds most appealing. Beyond citizens’ assemblies, her research explores new avenues for systematically gathering public input on complex decisions and examines how the framing of questions in preference‑elicitation contexts can shape the conclusions drawn. She feels fortunate to study these questions from within both political science and EECS, granting her the freedom to delve deeply into the political and technical aspects of tools for more direct governance. Reflecting on her journey, Flanigan notes that from the beginning she sensed a sense of belonging at MIT; her unconventional ways of thinking and problem‑solving, which had seemed peculiar elsewhere, finally felt like a natural fit. This feeling, she says, has been fully borne out since her arrival.