People at a conference

Transitional arrangements to support governing, coordinating and funding for collective impact

METIUS

A consortium – called METIUS – has been funded by UK Research and Innovation to pursue work in close alignment to ESIC. METIUS is short for ‘Mobilizing Evidence Through artificial Intelligence and User-informed Synthesis. The original funding call was announced on 19 September 2024 and the successful consortium was announced on 21 September 2025. The consortium is led by Sarah Miller at Queen’s University Belfast and co-led by Laurenz Mahlanza-Langer at the Pan African Collective for Evidence. METIUS has a placeholder for its future website.

METIUS will contribute to ESIC in the following key ways:

  • supporting four sectoral hubs, with their broad focus listed below and final scope being determined
    • crime and justice
    • education
    • environmental management
    • sustainable development accelerators (or enablers)
  • exploring the possibility of establishing a sub-regional hub for the UK, Ireland and other parts of Europe (but not Central Asia, which will eventually be included in a fully functional regional hub)
  • co-leading the development of the open-data system via METIUS consortium member James Thomas, as well as contributing data to the open-data system via the four sectoral hubs
  • contributing to the methods transformation required to get us to policy-scale, AI-enabled living evidence syntheses (which will be considered as a year-2 foundational investment).
Several METIUS members sit on the Communities council, including Sarah Miller representing METIUS as a whole, James Thomas representing METIUS and other initiatives contributing to the open-data system, Laurenz Mahlanza-Langer representing both another initiative contributing to the open-data system and a regional network, and Will Moy representing the Campbell Collaboration and Building a Global Evidence Synthesis Community more generally.