Bailey Flanigan has been guided by her personal selective but wide-ranging curiosity since she was a baby taking part in on her household’s farm in Wisconsin. Describing her youthful self as energetic and a bit unruly, she channeled her vitality into all the pieces from constructing booby traps to enterprise experimental building tasks, pursuing a robust curiosity in medication, writing novels and music, and planning a nonprofit group to cut back social inequality.
By highschool, Flannigan had developed a robust fascination with sure topics.
“I misplaced the motivation to take all of the APs.” [advanced placement] A category for that goal. “My curiosity was drawn to courses that allowed me to be artistic, utilizing arithmetic to resolve real-world issues, writing creatively, making music, connecting far-flung concepts, and delving deeply into the humanities.” “As a substitute of becoming a member of golf equipment, I ended up spending quite a lot of time pondering and creating by myself and attempting to determine what I loved.”
Flannigan presently holds a joint college place between the MIT Schwarzman Faculty of Computing and MIT’s Division of Political Science, Electrical Engineering, and Laptop Science (EECS), and can also be a principal investigator on the MIT Institute for Info and Resolution Programs. She has been concerned in analysis on the College of Wisconsin, Nationwide Institutes of Well being, Google, Carnegie Mellon College, Drexel College, Harvard College, Princeton College, and Stanford College. Her present analysis focuses on utilizing computational and mathematical instruments to create new avenues for significant democratic participation.
Maybe unsurprisingly, her path so far has traversed a variety of topics and disciplines, from medication and bioengineering to public well being and economics to a joint appointment at MIT in laptop science and political science that started in fall 2025.
“My trajectory throughout disciplines was merely the results of pursuing the issues that I felt had been most urgent or inspiring on the time. Alongside the way in which, I encountered many conditions for which commonplace strategies weren’t ample coaching or {qualifications}. This was typically unsettling, but in addition very pleasing, and developed the flexibility to study the language of recent fields extra simply, a talent that’s nearly important to my present analysis and work.”
Whereas attending the College of Wisconsin-Madison, Flannigan computationally studied most cancers therapeutic targets and tumor genetics in a moist lab. She says she discovered the analysis intellectually fascinating, however finally started to query whether or not it could have the impression she hoped.
“On the time, I started to fret that the science I used to be growing could be used, at finest, solely by a small, comparatively rich minority of the world, when there have been many extra individuals affected by way more preventable illnesses,” she says.
So Flannigan went into public well being, researching microfluidic units for HIV detection that might be utilized in low-resource settings. To start with, she started dabbling in economics as a result of she was nonetheless troubled by the restricted sources of those settings.
Across the identical time, Flannigan’s instructors started to chip away at any preconceptions she had about her skills.
Stephen Wright, a professor of legislation and artistic writing on the College of Wisconsin-Madison, served as Flannigan’s casual mentor by means of the college, and the 2 collaborated on instances for the Wisconsin Innocence Challenge.
“He guided my rising curiosity in science, social inequality, and economics,” she says. “He was one of many individuals most liable for convincing me that I might purpose increased in my profession and that I might really go to locations like MIT and Harvard.”
Additionally, whereas she was in faculty, Debbie Berger and Julie Stubbs, UW-Madison’s scholarship director, emailed Flannigan a number of occasions encouraging her to use for the Goldwater Scholarship.
“I saved deleting their emails, pondering they had been spam. I by no means thought I used to be the sort of individual to use for one thing like that. Their persistence satisfied me to use, and within the course of, my perspective on myself started to alter,” she says.
After graduating from the College of California, Madison, Flannigan labored as a doctoral analysis assistant in economics at Princeton College. There, Professor Evita Nestoridi, now an affiliate professor at Stony Brook College, additionally supplied essential help by having Flannigan audit her sensible evaluation courses.
“Evita’s class was my first publicity to formal arithmetic and proofs, and I liked it a lot that it fully modified the trajectory of my profession,” Flannigan says. “I used to be skeptical at first, however she satisfied me that I might do math on the graduate stage. Because of her encouragement, I utilized to a pc science PhD program the next fall.”
Flannigan selected Carnegie Mellon College for his Ph.D., the place he started researching social selection and democratic decision-making, fulfilling a twin ardour for expertise analysis and the query of “who will get what and why,” he mentioned, quoting Nobel Prize-winning economist Al Roth.
Flannigan developed an algorithm to randomly choose members for public conferences. It was designed for the frequent case the place keen members self-select in a method that doesn’t mirror inhabitants measurement. In his coverage temporary, Flannigan gave the hypothetical instance of a rally on synthetic intelligence, the place motivated attendees skew youthful, extra educated and fascinated by expertise, and different teams concerned within the challenge could also be underrepresented. The instruments developed by Flannigan assist stability traits and representations of the choice course of, akin to equal alternatives for particular person participation, resistance to course of manipulation, and transparency, all of which might affect public perceptions of the legitimacy of decision-making teams.
Flannigan’s work is now being deployed at panot.org, a extensively used open-access web site that hosts algorithms for randomly deciding on members in citizen conferences.
“This website principally walks practitioners by means of a really technical set of tradeoffs, makes these tradeoffs simple to learn, and optimizes them in accordance with the priorities dictated by the practitioner,” she says.
Flannigan mentioned he’s motivated to enhance the way in which the general public makes political selections, “as a result of if a political resolution goes to be attainable, the general public must really feel that it’s achieved by means of a official political course of, or no less than by means of the type of authorities that I discover most engaging.”
Past his work on citizen assemblies, Flannigan’s analysis explores new avenues for the way to extra systematically receive public enter on advanced selections and the way the type of questions requested of individuals within the context of eliciting preferences can affect the content material of the conclusions.
“I really feel very lucky to have the ability to research these points from each political science and EECS, as a result of I’ve the liberty to discover as deeply as I want each the political and technical content material of instruments for extra direct governance,” she says.
Flannigan’s curiosity, which permits her to journey throughout completely different terrains, is an ideal match for the MIT surroundings, she says.
“From the start, I felt a way of belonging at MIT, and the way in which I believed and problem-solved, which appeared odd in lots of conditions, really made me really feel extra like I belonged,” she says. “This was a really refreshing feeling, and it has been 100% confirmed since I arrived.”
