Following the questions where they lead
Ever since she was a child playing on her family’s farmland in Wisconsin, Bailey Flanigan was guided by her own selective, yet wide-ranging, curiosity.
By high school, Flanigan was intensely drawn to particular 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 — and I worked on such classes obsessively, as an opportunity to explore my intuitions and interests,” she says. “Instead of joining clubs, I ended up spending a lot of time thinking and creating on my own, and trying to understand what I enjoyed.”
Today Flanigan is a shared faculty member 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 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. Her current work focuses on using computational and mathematical tools to create new avenues for meaningful democratic participation.
Perhaps not surprisingly, her path has crossed huge expanses of subject matter and specialties — from medicine and bioengineering to public health, and from economics to her joint appointment at MIT in computer science and political science, which began in fall 2025.
“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 a lot of situations where I was less well-trained or qualified in the standard ways. While this was sometimes precarious, it was also incredibly fun, and it cultivated my ability to learn the languages of new disciplines more easily — a skill pretty much essential to my current research and job.”