贝利·弗拉尼根 (Bailey Flanigan) 从小就在威斯康星州, 自家的农田里玩耍，她的选择性, 但广泛的, 好奇心一直引导着她。她形容年轻时的自己充满活力，但有点不守规矩,，她把精力投入到一切事情上，从建造诱杀装置到实验性建筑项目，从探索对医学的浓厚兴趣到写小说和音乐，再到规划非营利组织以帮助减少社会不平等。
Ever since she was a child playing on her family的 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.
到了高中, 弗拉尼根就对某些特定科目产生了强烈的兴趣。
By high school, Flanigan was intensely drawn to particular subjects.
“I 发现自己没有动力去参加所有 AP [advanced Placement] 课程。我的兴趣来自那些可以发挥创造力的课程—，我可以使用数学来解决现实世界的问题,创造性地写作,制作音乐,连接遥远的想法,或深入探索人文学科—，我痴迷于这些课程,作为探索我的直觉和兴趣的机会,”她说。 “我没有加入俱乐部,，而是花了很多时间自己思考和创造,，并试图了解我喜欢什么。”
“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.”
也许并不奇怪,，她的道路跨越了巨大的主题和专业—，从医学和生物工程到公共卫生,，从经济学到她于2025年秋季开始在麻省理工学院联合任命计算机科学和政治学,。
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.
“M我跨学科的轨迹只是我追寻当时我认为最紧迫或最鼓舞人心的问题的结果。一路走来,，我在很多情况下都遇到了训练不足或标准方式不够资格的情况。虽然这有时很不稳定,，但也非常有趣,，它培养了我更轻松地学习新学科语言的能力—这项技能对我当前的研究和工作来说非常重要。”
“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.”
在威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校, Flanigan 上大学时，他在一个湿实验室中研究癌症的治疗靶点并进行肿瘤遗传学的计算。她说她发现这项研究在智力上很有趣,，但最终开始怀疑它是否会产生她想要的那种影响。
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. She says she found the research intellectually interesting, but eventually began to wonder about whether it would have the kind of impact she wanted.
“当时,我开始担心我正在开发的科学在最好的情况下,可能只能,被世界上一小部分,相对富裕的部分,使用，而当时有更多的人患有更容易预防的疾病,”她说。
“At the time, I started to worry that the science I was developing might only, in the best case, be used by a small, relatively wealthy fraction of the world, when there were people suffering from much more-preventable diseases in much larger numbers,” she says.
因此，弗拉尼根转向公共卫生,，她研究了可用于资源匮乏环境的艾滋病毒检测微流体设备。仍然对推动这些设置的环境感到困扰 资源有限，从,开始，她开始涉足经济学。
So Flanigan moved toward public health, where she researched microfluidic devices for HIV detection that could be used in low-resource settings. Still bothered by the circumstances driving these settings limited resources to begin with, she then started to dabble in economics.
大约在同一时间, Flanigan’的学术顾问正在消除她对自己能力的偏见。
Around the same time, Flanigan的 academic advisors were chipping away at preconceptions she held about her own abilities.
史蒂文·赖特, 是威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校, 的法律和创意写作教授，在整个大学, 中担任弗拉尼根的非正式导师，他们在威斯康星州无罪项目中共同处理了一个案件。
Steven Wright, a professor of law and creative writing at UW-Madison, served as Flanigan的 informal mentor throughout college, and they worked together on a case at the Wisconsin Innocence Project.
“她说，她引导我不断发展对科学,社会不平等,和经济学,”的兴趣。 “He 是最有责任说服我的人之一，让我相信我可以在职业生涯中有更高的目标,，而且我实际上可以去麻省理工学院或哈佛大学等地方。”
“He guided me through my evolving interests in science, social inequality, and economics,” she says. “He was one of the people most responsible for convincing me that I could aim higher in my career, and that I could actually go to places like MIT or Harvard.”
此外，当她在大学, 上大学时，威斯康辛大学麦迪逊分校奖学金办公室, Debbie Berger 和Julie Stubbs, 的两位负责人多次向Flanigan 发送电子邮件, 鼓励她申请Goldwater 奖学金。
Also while she was 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 a Goldwater Scholarship.
“I 不断删除他们的电子邮件, 认为它们是垃圾邮件 — 我不认为 我是那种会申请类似事情的人。他们的坚持说服了我应用,，在这个过程中,我对自己的看法开始改变,”她说。
“I kept deleting their emails, thinking they were spam — I didn’t think I was the kind of person that would apply for something like that. Their persistence convinced me to apply, and in the process, the horizons I perceived for myself started to change,” she says.
从威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校毕业后, Flanigan 在普林斯顿大学担任经济学博士前研究助理。还有, Evita Nestoridi, 教授现在是石溪大学的副教授, 也提供了关键的支持, 让Flanigan 旁听她的真实分析课。
After graduating from UW-Madison, Flanigan worked as a predoctoral research assistant in economics at Princeton. There, Professor Evita Nestoridi, now an associate professor at Stony Brook University, also provided a pivotal moment of support, letting Flanigan audit her real analysis class.
“Evita的 class was my first real exposure to formal mathematics and proofs, and I loved it so much that it completely changed my career trajectory,” Flanigan says. “Despite my initial doubts, she convinced me that I could do math at the graduate level; because of her encouragement, I applied to computer science PhD programs the subsequent fall.”
选择卡内基梅隆大学攻读博士学位, 弗拉尼根开始研究社会选择和民主决策,，以服务于她对技术研究和“谁得到什么以及为什么,”问题的双重热情，她说,引用了诺贝尔奖获得者经济学家阿尔·罗斯的话。
Choosing Carnegie Mellon for her PhD, Flanigan began research on social choice and democratic decision-making, serving her dual passions for technical research and the issue of “who gets what and why,” she says, quoting Nobel Prize-winning economist Al Roth.
Flanigan 开发了随机选择公民 集会, 参与者的算法，该算法专为常见情况而设计，即愿意的参与者以不反映较大人口的方式进行自我选择。在一份政策简报, Flanigan 中，假设了一个关于人工智能, 的集会的例子，其自愿参与者可能会倾向于年轻, 受过更多教育、对技术感兴趣, 的公民,，而其他群体尽管在这个问题上利害攸关，但代表性不足。弗拉尼根开发的工具有助于平衡代表性与选择过程的特征，例如个人之间的平等’参与机会,对过程操纵的抵制,和透明度—所有这些都会影响决策群体’合法性的普遍看法。
Flanigan has developed algorithms that randomly choose participants of citizens assemblies, designed for the common case where willing participants self-select in ways that do not reflect the larger population. In a policy brief, Flanigan gave a hypothetical example of an assembly on artificial intelligence, whose willing participants might skew toward younger, more educated citizens with an interest in technology, leaving other groups underrepresented despite their stake in the issue. The tools Flanigan has developed help balance representation with such features of the selection process as equality among individuals chances to participate, resistance to manipulation of the process, and transparency — all of which can affect the general perception of a decision-making group的 legitimacy.
Flanigan的工作现已部署在 panelot.org, 上，这是一个广泛使用的开放访问网站，托管用于随机选择公民集会参与者的算法。
Flanigan的 work is now deployed on panelot.org, a widely used open-access website hosting algorithms for randomly selecting citizen assembly participants.
“该网站基本上引导从业者完成一系列原本非常技术性的权衡,，使这些权衡清晰可见，然后根据从业者规定的优先级进行优化,”她说。
“The site basically walks practitioners through a series of otherwise very technical trade-offs, making those trade-offs legible and then optimizing according to the priorities practitioners dictate,” she says.
弗拉尼根说，她有动力改善公众做出政治决策的方式, “因为如果任何政治解决方案都可行,，公众需要感觉到它是通过合法的政治程序—至少在我认为最有吸引力的政府形式下实现的。”
Flanigan says she is motivated to improve how the public makes political decisions, “because if any political solution is going to be viable, the public needs to feel that it was arrived at via a legitimate political process — at least under the forms of government I find most appealing.”
除了她对公民 集会, Flanigan的研究之外，她的研究还在探索新的途径，涉及如何更系统地获取公众对复杂决策的意见,，以及我们在偏好启发背景下向人们提出的问题的格式如何影响我们结论的实质内容。
Beyond her work on citizens assemblies, Flanigan的 research is exploring new avenues related to how to more systematically get public input on complex decisions, and how the format of questions we ask people in preference elicitation contexts can affect the substance of what we conclude.
“I feel so lucky to be studying these questions from within both political science and EECS, because I have the freedom to explore both the political and technical substance of tools for more direct governance as deeply as I want,” she says.
Flanigan的 curiosity-driven journey through widely varying terrain feels right in the MIT environment, she says.
“从一开始,我在麻省理工学院获得了这种归属感—就像我的思维和解决问题的方式,这在许多情况下看起来很奇怪,实际上让我更有归属感,”她说。 “这是一种超级清爽的感觉,，自从我到达以来，它已经得到了100%的证实。”
“From the beginning, I got this sense of belonging at MIT — like my ways of thinking and problem-solving, which had seemed peculiar in many situations, actually made me belong more,” she says. “This was a super refreshing feeling, and it has been 100 percent borne out since I arrived.”