Bailey Flanigan

Bailey Flanigan (she/her) is a Theodore T. Miller Career Development Assistant Professor at MIT, jointly appointed in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (LIDS) and the Department of Political Science. Her work bridges political science and computer science through formal theory, focusing on democratic innovations and computational methods.

• Education: PhD in Computer Science (Carnegie Mellon University, 2024), B.S. in Bioengineering (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
• Experience: HDSI Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard (2024-2025), prior research in economics (Yale), computer science (Drexel), and public health (Philani Nonprofit, South Africa)

Research interests include:

• Combining formal theory (proofs) with tools from social choice, game theory, algorithms, and machine learning
• Applications to political methodology (survey sampling, opinion measurement) and direct democracy innovations like deliberative minipublics and participatory budgeting
• Development of computational sortition tools for democratic processes

She is organizing a conference on computational social choice at Wellesley (Oct 15-17, 2025) and received the Structural Democracy Fellowship to fund an open-source computational sortition platform (launching Fall 2025).

• Email: baileyf@mit.edu
• Office: MIT Building E53-439