Since childhood, Bailey Flanigan has been guided by her selective yet broad curiosity while playing on her family's farmland in Wisconsin. Describing her younger self as spirited and a bit unruly, she directed her energies towards building booby traps, doing experimental construction projects, exploring a strong interest in medicine, writing fiction and music, and planning nonprofit organizations to address social inequality.
By high school, Flanigan became intensely drawn to specific subjects. "I found myself unmotivated to take all the AP [advanced placement] classes for the sake of it. My interest was captured by classes where I could be creative — where I could use math to solve real-world problems, creatively write, make music, connect distant ideas, or deeply explore the humanities," she says. Instead of joining clubs, she spent time thinking and creating on her own to understand what she enjoyed.
Today, Flanigan is a shared faculty member at MIT's Schwarzman College of Computing and the departments of Political Science and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), as well as a principal investigator at 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 various prestigious universities including Carnegie Mellon, Drexel, Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford. Her current work focuses on using computational and mathematical tools to create new avenues for meaningful democratic participation.
Unsurprisingly, her path has spanned vast subject areas and specialties — from medicine and bioengineering to public health and economics, culminating in her joint appointment at MIT starting in fall 2025. Flanigan states, "My trajectory across disciplines was just a result of me chasing down the problems I felt were most pressing or inspiring at the time. Along the way, I wound up in many situations where I was less well-trained or qualified in the standard ways. While this was sometimes precarious, it was also incredibly fun, cultivating my ability to learn the languages of new disciplines more easily — a skill essential to my current research and job."
During her time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Flanigan worked in a wet lab on therapeutic targets in cancer and computationally on tumor genetics. Although she found the research intellectually stimulating, she began to question whether it would have the impact she desired. "At the time, I started to worry that the science I was developing might only, at best, be used by a small, wealthy fraction of the world, while there were people suffering from much more preventable diseases in much larger numbers," she explains.
This led her to pivot towards public health, where she researched microfluidic devices for HIV detection that could be utilized in low-resource settings. Still troubled by the circumstances driving these settings’ limited resources, she began to explore economics.
Around this time, her academic advisors were challenging her preconceived notions about her own abilities. Steven Wright, a professor of law and creative writing at UW-Madison, served as an informal mentor throughout her college years, guiding her through her evolving interests in science, social inequality, and economics. "He was one of the people most responsible for convincing me that I could aim higher in my career, and that I could actually go to places like MIT or Harvard," she reflects.
While in college, the two heads of the UW-Madison scholarship office, Debbie Berger and Julie Stubbs, repeatedly encouraged Flanigan to apply for a Goldwater Scholarship. Initially, she deleted their emails, thinking they were spam — she didn’t see herself as the type of person who would apply for such things. Their persistence eventually convinced her to apply, leading to a shift in her self-perception.
After graduating from UW-Madison, Flanigan worked as a predoctoral research assistant in economics at Princeton. There, Professor Evita Nestoridi provided pivotal support, allowing Flanigan to audit her 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 trajectory," Flanigan recalls. "Despite my initial doubts, she convinced me that I could do math at the graduate level; because of her encouragement, I applied to computer science PhD programs the subsequent fall."
Choosing Carnegie Mellon for her PhD, Flanigan began her research on social choice and democratic decision-making, fulfilling her dual passions for technical research and addressing the question of "who gets what and why," quoting Nobel Prize-winning economist Al Roth. Flanigan has developed algorithms that randomly select participants for citizens’ assemblies, designed for the common case where willing participants self-select in ways that do not reflect the larger population.
In a policy brief, Flanigan provided a hypothetical example of an assembly on artificial intelligence, where willing participants might skew towards younger, more educated citizens with an interest in technology, while other groups remain underrepresented despite their stake in the issue. The tools Flanigan has developed assist in balancing representation, considering features of the selection process such as equality of individuals’ chances to participate, resistance to manipulation, and transparency — all of which can affect the legitimacy of decision-making groups.
Flanigan’s work is now deployed on panelot.org, a widely used open-access website hosting algorithms for randomly selecting citizen assembly participants. "The site basically walks practitioners through a series of otherwise very technical trade-offs, making those trade-offs legible and then optimizing according to the priorities practitioners dictate," she explains.
Flanigan is motivated to improve how the public makes political decisions, stating, "Because if any political solution is going to be viable, the public needs to feel that it was arrived at via a legitimate political process — at least under the forms of government I find most appealing."
Beyond her work on citizens’ assemblies, Flanigan’s research is also exploring new avenues for systematically obtaining public input on complex decisions and how the format of questions we ask in preference elicitation contexts can influence the conclusions we draw. "I feel so lucky to be studying these questions from within both political science and EECS, because I have the freedom to explore both the political and technical substance of tools for more direct governance as deeply as I want," she shares.
Flanigan’s curiosity-driven journey through diverse terrains feels right at home in the MIT environment. "From the beginning, I got this sense of belonging at MIT — like my ways of thinking and problem-solving, which had seemed peculiar in many situations, actually made me belong more," she notes. "This was a super refreshing feeling, and it has been 100 percent borne out since I arrived."