Ever since she was a child playing on her family’s farm in Wisconsin, Bailey Flanigan was guided by her selective, yet wide-ranging, curiosity. Describing his youth as spirited and wild, he directed his energies into everything from building booby traps to conducting experimental construction projects to exploring medical interests to writing fiction and music to organizing non-profit organizations to help reduce social inequality.
In high school, Flanigan was obsessed with certain subjects.
“I found myself reluctant to take the entire AP [advanced placement] classes because of that. “My interest was captured by classes where I could be creative – where I could use math to solve real-world problems, write creatively, make music, connect distant ideas, or critically examine humanity – and I worked in those classes with a sense of wonder, as an opportunity to test my knowledge and interests,” he says.
Today Flanigan is a member of the shared faculty between the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the MIT departments of Political Science and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and a principal investigator at the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. He has participated 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 mathematical and statistical tools to develop new forms of meaningful democratic participation.
Perhaps it is not surprising that his path has passed through a variety of topics and specialties – from medicine and bioengineering to public health, and from economics to his joint appointment at MIT in computer science and political science, which began in the fall of 2025.
“My trajectory in all fields was just the result of chasing problems that I felt most pressing or inspiring at the time. All the time, I came out in many situations where I was not well trained or trained in conventional ways. Although this was sometimes dangerous, it was also incredibly fun, and it increased my ability to learn important languages to easily access my new skills – current research and my current skills.”
In college at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Flanigan worked in a wet lab on therapeutic targets in cancer and computationally on tumor genetics. He says he found the research conceptually interesting, but ended up wondering if it would have the impact he was looking for.
“At that time, I began to worry that the science I was developing could be used in a small part of the world that is very rich, while there were people suffering from preventable diseases in very large numbers,” he said.
So Flanigan moved into public health, where he researched microfluidic devices to detect HIV that could be used in low-resource settings. Still troubled by the conditions driving these limited resources to begin with, he began to enter economics.
At the same time, Flanigan’s academic advisors disagreed with the ideas he had about his abilities.
Steven Wright, a professor of law and creative writing at UW-Madison, served as Flanigan’s informal mentor throughout college, and they worked together on the Wisconsin Innocence Project case.
“He steered me toward my developing interests in science, social and economic inequality,” he says. “He was one of the people responsible for convincing me that I could pursue my career, and that I could actually go to places like MIT or Harvard.”
And while 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.
“I kept deleting their emails, thinking they were spam – I didn’t think I was the type of person to apply for something like that. Their persistence convinced me to apply, and in the process, my horizons began to change,” he says.
After graduating from UW-Madison, Flanigan worked as a pre-doctoral research assistant in economics at Princeton. There, Professor Evita Nestoridi, who is now an associate professor at Stony Brook University, also provided an important moment of support, allowing Flanigan to test his real analysis class.
Flanigan says: “Evita’s class was my first exposure to mathematics and formal proofs, and I loved it so much that it completely changed my life. “Despite my initial doubts, she convinced me that I could do graduate-level mathematics; because of his encouragement, I applied to PhD programs in computer science the following fall.”
Choosing Carnegie Mellon for his PhD, Flanigan began research on social choice and democratic decision-making, serving his twin passions of technical research and the issue of “who gets what and why,” he said, citing Nobel Prize-winning economist Al Roth.
Flanigan developed algorithms that randomly select participants for citizen meetings, designed for the common case where willing participants choose themselves in ways that do not reflect the general population. In the policy brief, Flanigan offered a hypothetical example of a conference on artificial intelligence, whose willing participants may turn to younger, more educated citizens interested in technology, leaving other groups unrepresented despite being affected by the issue. The tools Flanigan developed aided representation with aspects of the selection process such as balance between individuals’ opportunities to participate, resistance to process manipulation, and transparency — all of which can affect the general perception of the legitimacy of the decision-making group.
Flanigan’s work is now being used in panelot.org, a widely used open access website algorithm for randomly selecting citizens’ meeting participants.
“The site moves experts through a series of technical trade-offs, enabling those trade-offs to be made and developed according to key priorities,” he said.
Flanigan says he’s motivated to improve the way the public makes political decisions, “because if there’s going to be a political solution that’s going to work, the public needs to feel that it’s reached through a legitimate political process — at least under the forms of government that I find most attractive.”
In addition to his work in citizen forums, Flanigan’s research explores new ways of getting structured public input into complex decisions, and how the way we design questions based on preferences can affect the context of our conclusions.
“I feel very fortunate to study these questions within political science and EECS, because I have the freedom to explore both the political and technical aspects of direct governance tools as deeply as I want,” she said.
Flanigan’s curiosity-driven journey through a diverse landscape feels right in the MIT environment, she said.
“From the beginning, I got this sense of belonging to MIT – like my ways of thinking and solving problems, which seemed unusual in many situations, actually made me more,” he said. “This was a very refreshing feeling, and it has been proven 100 percent since I arrived.”
