Following the questions where they lead
Assistant Professor Bailey Flanigan has arrived at complex computational methods for helping democracy thrive. A profile of MIT Assistant Professor Bailey Flanigan explores how she develops complex computational methods for helping democracy thrive. "This was a super refreshing feeling, and it has been 100 percent borne out since I arrived."
Key Takeaways
- Credits : Photo: Jerard Welcome Previous image Next image 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.
- 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."
- 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.
- 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."
In college at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Flanigan worked in a wet lab on therapeutic targets in cancer and computationally on tumor genetics.
- So Flanigan moved toward public health, where she researched microfluidic devices for HIV detection that could be used in low-resource settings.
A profile of MIT Assistant Professor Bailey Flanigan explores how she develops complex computational methods for helping democracy thrive. Assistant Professor Bailey Flanigan has arrived at complex computational methods for helping democracy thrive. "This was a super refreshing feeling, and it has been 100 percent borne out since I arrived."
Credits : Photo: Jerard Welcome Previous image Next image 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. Describing her young self as spirited and a bit unruly, she directed her energies to everything from building booby traps to doing experimental construction projects to exploring an intense interest in medicine to writing fiction and music to planning nonprofit organizations to help lessen social inequality. 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."
For more details please read the original article at MIT News AI.
Continue Learning
Comments
Comments appear only after moderation. Your email identifies your submission to the moderator and is never displayed here.
No approved comments yet.