Following the questions where they lead

Bailey Flanigan, a young girl from Wisconsin, displayed an insatiable curiosity from a very early age, pursuing an eclectic array of interests ranging from building booby traps to conducting experimental construction projects and exploring medicinal research to writing fiction and music. By high school, she honed in on subjects that allowed her creativity to flourish, such as those involving the application of math to solve real-world problems, creative writing, music, and the exploration of humanities.

Instead of joining clubs, she preferred to spend her time thinking, creating, and delving into what truly captivated her.

Flanigan currently holds a shared faculty position between MIT's Schwarzman College of Computing and the MIT departments of Political Science and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Her research primarily revolves around developing computational and mathematical tools to foster meaningful democratic participation. Her academic journey has been anything but conventional, often involving her delving into areas where she lacked formal training or qualifications.

This approach not only made her research more enjoyable but also honed her ability to quickly adapt and learn new disciplines, a skill essential to her current line of work.

During her undergraduate years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Flanigan juggled a wet lab focused on therapeutic targets in cancer with computational work on tumor genetics. She found the research intellectually stimulating, but began to question its potential for broad impact. She became increasingly concerned that the benefits of her scientific work might be limited to a small, relatively affluent subset of the global population, while many people continued to suffer from preventable diseases in much greater numbers.

This concern led her to explore public health, where she developed microfluidic devices for HIV detection suitable for use in resource-scarce settings. Despite her growing interest in economics, her college advisors helped her overcome self-doubts about her abilities, encouraging her to aim for elite institutions like MIT or Harvard.

After graduating, Flanigan worked as a predoctoral research assistant in economics at Princeton University. It was here that she encountered Professor Evita Nestoridi, who introduced her to the world of formal mathematics and proofs, a field that profoundly influenced her career. Inspired, Flanigan applied for and was accepted into Carnegie Mellon University's PhD program in computer science, where she pursued research on social choice and democratic decision-making, two passions of hers.

Flanigan's work focuses on creating algorithms for randomly selecting participants for citizens' assemblies, a critical issue in ensuring diverse representation and preventing manipulation in such decision-making bodies. Her innovative tools aim to balance representation with equality among participants, transparency, and resistance to manipulation, thereby enhancing the legitimacy of such decision-making processes.