This theme is structured around three interconnected components that shape our work:

• Governing Science in the Public Interest: Exploring how scientific evidence is produced, governed and used in policymaking how research and governance systems can better protect the public interest.
• Innovative data and methods: Applying cutting-edge tools, including system approaches, machine learning, and linked datasets, to complex, real world contexts.
• Appraisal and policy evaluation methods: Developing innovative appraisal tools that account for cross-sectoral impacts and using advanced casual methos for evaluating implemented policies.

This cross-cutting theme explores how scientific evidence is produced, governed and used in policymaking, and how research and governance systems can better protect the public interest. It examines conflicts of interest, industry involvement in research, research transparency, scientific integrity and accountability mechanisms in public health and related policy domains.

Across the Centre, the theme provides a lens through which to consider how conflicts of interest, commercial influence and research governance may affect the production, interpretation and use of evidence. It will work across the Centre’s research themes to embed consideration of these issues within research design, partnerships, funding and policy engagement, while developing and evaluating tools, frameworks and institutional approaches that promote transparency, scientific integrity and public trust.

Through engagement with researchers, policymakers, funders and civil society, the theme aims to strengthen research and governance systems so that evidence generation and its use in policy serve the public interest.

This theme is led by Dr Tess Legg and Amy Thompson

Current Research Projects

• Exploring how policy makers understand and approach conflicts of interest in climate governance: Building understanding and developing effective communication strategies
• How to conceptualise and manage conflicts of interest in climate governance: Engaging EU policy makers and NGOs to develop a new research agenda

Recent Publications

• Developing guidance on assessing and managing conflicts of interest for a complex public health research consortium
• Safeguarding governance and advancing policy at the nexus of climate and health: a commercial determinants of health perspective
• Constructing and contesting industry's role in multistakeholder governance: a qualitative analysis of responses to WHO consultations
• Why addressing conflicts of interest is essential to progress in reducing commercially driven health harms: lessons from tobacco
• Industry influence on public health policy formulation in the UK: a complex systems approach

This cross-cutting theme drives the application and adoption of cutting-edge tools, including systems approaches, AI, and linked datasets, across complex, real-world contexts. This includes identifying and evaluating new and emerging forms of data — digital trace, sensor, administrative, synthetic and platform-derived — and establishing how far each can be trusted to answer public health questions. Alongside this, we will build the AI infrastructure needed to work with these data at scale: shared pipelines and tools for collection, linkage, annotation and analysis, underpinned by the research governance, ethics and reproducibility practices that make such methods defensible in policy settings.

We will pursue partnerships with national investments in this space, including UKRI data and AI centres, and work across the Centre's themes so that the methods and technologies developed here are adopted, cited and built on by colleagues rather than remaining confined to single projects.

This theme is led by Professor David Ellis and Professor Eleonora Fichera

This cross-cutting theme develops innovative appraisal tools that account for cross-sectoral impacts in policy design (ex-ante) and uses advanced causal methods for evaluating implemented policies (ex-post).

We aim to bring together various strategies from different methodological advancements happening across diverse disciplinary domains (such as econometrics, psychometrics, network analysis, micro-simulations and machine learning). These tools would be employed to evaluate policies linked to health across various contexts and highlight the heterogenous and systemic distribution of impacts.

This theme is led by Dr Andrea Serna Castano and Dr Kalyan Kumar Kameshwara