Ever since she was a child playing on her family’s farm in Wisconsin, Bailey Flanigan has been guided by her own selective, yet pervasive, curiosity. Describing his youthful self as enthusiastic and a little unruly, he channeled his energy into everything from building booby traps to doing experimental construction projects, exploring a deep interest in medicine, writing fiction and music, and planning non-profit organizations to help reduce social inequality.
By high school, Flanigan was strongly attracted to particular subjects.
“I didn’t find myself motivated to take all the APs [advanced placement] Classes for this. “I became interested in classes where I could be creative — where I could use math to solve real-world problems, write creatively, make music, connect distant ideas, or explore the humanities in depth — and I took such classes obsessively, seeing them as an opportunity to explore my intuitions and interests,” she says. “Instead of joining clubs, I spent a lot of time thinking and creating on my own, and trying to understand how. What fun I had.”
Today Flanigan is a shared faculty member between the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and MIT’s Political Science and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) departments, and a principal investigator in the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. She has been involved in research at the University of Wisconsin, the National Institutes of Health, Google, and Carnegie Mellon, Drexel, Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford universities. His current work focuses on using computational and mathematical tools to create new pathways to meaningful democratic participation.
Perhaps not surprisingly, his path has crossed a vast expanse of subject matter and specialties – from medicine and bioengineering to public health, and from economics to computer science and political science to his joint appointment at MIT, which began in the fall of 2025.
“My trajectory across disciplines was simply the result of pursuing the problems I felt were most pressing or inspiring at the time. Along the way, I fell into many situations where I was less trained or qualified in standard ways. While it was sometimes unsettling, it was also incredibly fun, and it developed my ability to more easily learn the languages of new disciplines – a skill that is quite essential to my current research and job.”
In college at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Flanigan worked in a wet lab computationally on therapeutic targets and tumor genetics in cancer. She says she found the research intellectually interesting, but ultimately wondered whether it would have the kind of impact she wanted.
She says, “At that time, I began to worry that the science I was developing could, at best, only be used by a small, relatively wealthy part of the world, while vast numbers of people suffered from more preventable diseases.”
So Flanigan moved into public health, where she researched microfluidic devices for HIV detection that could be used in low-resource settings. Initially still troubled by the conditions governing the limited resources of these settings, he began dabbling in economics.
Around the same time, Flanigan’s academic advisors were breaking down her preconceptions about her own abilities.
Steven Wright, professor of law and creative writing at UW–Madison, served as Flanigan’s informal advisor throughout college, and they worked together on a case at the Wisconsin Innocence Project.
“He guided me through my growing interest in science, social inequality, and economics,” she says. “He was one of the people who made me believe that I could aim high in my career, and that I could actually go to places like MIT or Harvard.”
Also while she was in college, the two heads of the UW–Madison scholarship office, Debbie Berger and Julie Stubbs, sent Flanigan repeated emails encouraging her to apply for the Goldwater Scholarship.
She says, “I kept deleting his emails thinking they were spam – I didn’t think I was the kind of person who would apply for something like that. His persistence convinced me to apply and, in the process, the horizons I thought I had for myself began to change.”
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, also provided a crucial moment of support, helping Flanigan audit his real analysis class.
“Evita’s class was my first real exposure to formal mathematics and proofs, and I loved it so much that it completely changed my career path,” Flanigan says. “Despite my initial skepticism, he convinced me that I could do mathematics at the graduate level; because of his encouragement, I later applied to computer science PhD programs.”
Choosing Carnegie Mellon for her PhD, Flanigan began research on social choice and democratic decision making, drawing on her dual passion for technological research and the issue of “who gets what and why,” she says, quoting Nobel Prize-winning economist Al Roth.
Flanigan developed algorithms that randomly select participants of citizens’ gatherings, designed for the general case where interested participants self-select in ways that do not reflect the larger population. In a policy brief, Flanigan gave a hypothetical example of a gathering on artificial intelligence whose interested participants might be skewed toward younger, more educated citizens interested in the technology, thereby underrepresenting other groups regardless of their stake in the issue. The tools Flanigan developed help balance representativeness with such features of the selection process as equality between individuals’ chances of participating, resistance to manipulation of the process, and transparency – all of which can affect the general perception of the legitimacy of the decision-making group.
Flanigan’s work is now deployed on Panelot.org, a widely used open-access website hosting algorithms for randomly selecting citizens’ assembly participants.
She says, “The site basically walks physicians through a series of very technical trade-offs, makes those trade-offs legible and then optimizes according to the preferences set by physicians.”
Flanigan says he is motivated to improve the way the public makes political decisions, “because if a political solution is going to be viable, the public has to feel that it came through a legitimate political process – at least under the forms of government that I find most attractive.”
Beyond her work on citizens’ assemblies, Flanigan’s research is exploring new avenues related to how to more systematically obtain public input on complex decisions, and how the format of the questions we ask people in preference contexts can influence the substance of our findings.
She says, “I feel very fortunate to be studying these questions from within both political science and EECS, because I have the freedom to explore as deeply as I can both the political and technical substance of the instruments for more direct governance.”
She says Flanigan’s curiosity-driven travels across widely varying terrain feel right in the MIT environment.
She says, “I felt a sense of belonging at MIT right from the start — like my ways of thinking and problem-solving, which seemed strange in many situations, actually made me feel more like I belonged.” “It was a very refreshing feeling, and it has felt 100 percent since I arrived.”
