Metascience: Accelerating scientific progress
Talks and writing from Progress Conference 2025
Science is a fundamental driver of growth that contributes to the flywheel of progress. “Metascience” refers to the science of science itself, using the tools of science to study and improve how research is conducted. It has also come to denote a community of people advancing new ventures to pursue better ways of funding, organizing, and managing research.
We didn’t originally plan to have a “metascience track” at Progress Conference 2025, but when there were a half dozen excellent speakers we knew we had to put those talks next to each other to show distinct perspectives and models for scientific progress. Here are select talks from the conference and related writing.
Track dispatch
Inside the movement that’s rewriting how we do science by Smrithi Sunil
In this essay for Big Think’s special issue The Engine of Progress, RPI fellow Smrithi Sunil reports on the “metascience track” at the conference.
Ultimately, I find that what’s missing from today’s research funding ecosystem is not just more money, but incentives that encourage healthy competition between funders. Research funding in the U.S. remains remarkably one-dimensional. Most public science is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and, to a lesser extent, the National Science Foundation (NSF), agencies that overwhelmingly fund small, principal investigator-led grants designed for an earlier era of individual inquiry. This structure rewards safety over exploration and leaves little room for institutional or methodological experimentation. Unlike in venture capital, where investors compete to identify and back the most promising, high-risk ideas, science funders face no comparable pressure to seek out unconventional bets or refine their own models.
The result is a stagnant funding ecosystem that selects for conformity rather than creativity. A truly dynamic research economy would mirror the process of evolution: many funding mechanisms, each taking different approaches, competing for the best ideas and talent. If we can build that kind of diversity in our funding landscape, with real competition and variation, we might restore the adaptive spirit that science depends on.
Talk videos
PDB 2.0: a metascience experiment in scientific acceleration with AI
From Seemay Chou, scientist, CEO of Arcadia Science, and co-founder of Astera institute: “We’re moving into an age in which agents are our partners across all aspects of science. Machines will systematically process data, spot patterns, propose experiments, and even generate hypotheses across more and more of our work. A technological shift of this magnitude requires a similarly big shift in what science we pursue and how we go about it. Two major unanswered questions are 1) how we more rationally determine what data might be important to generate for AI-assisted discovery and 2) how we effectively design and scale those data systems. We recently funded and launched a new structural biology initiative called The Diffuse Project, which is aimed at enabling the next frontier models in protein biology — predicting not only how proteins are structured but how they move, which is central to their function. Diffuse gives us a golden opportunity to experiment with what science could look like in the future, empirically rethinking scientific systems and the role scientists play in them. Come learn more about the biophysical questions driving The Diffuse Project as well as the metascience levers we are testing in the process.”
Designing a new agency for progress, not process
How do you build a new national R&D agency from the ground up? In January 2023, the UK launched the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) with a $1B budget and a bold mandate: fund breakthroughs to drive the future of economic and societal progress. Watch founding CEO Ilan Gur as he pulls back the curtain on ARIA’s first three years. He will share stories behind the core, and often contrarian, DNA-level decisions that shaped the agency’s portfolio and operating model.
Learn why ARIA bets on people before projects, how ubiquitous clean energy will unlock a new materials and manufacturing paradigm, and the value of embedding a product team at the center of a government agency. This is a candid look into both scientific and institutional experimentation for anyone interested in building breakthroughs for a better future.
How to Prioritize Capabilities for the Intelligence Age
What does it mean to do high-impact science in the midst of massive transition? What capabilities are we missing now that we need to develop rapidly, and which do we need to be ready for what is coming?
Anastasia Gamick is the President and co-founder of Convergent Research, a mission control for frontier technology. Convergent has secured almost $400 million to design, launch and operate a new kind of organization for scientific and technological progress—the Focused Research Organization (FROs)—across a range of fields, including neuroscience, mathematics, astronomy, and climate.
In this talk, Anastasia will share Convergent’s outlook on the intelligence age, drawing lessons from the dozen or so FROs that Convergent has worked to launch.
Bell Labs Xs: Reimagining Corporate Research for the 21st Century
Jeffrey Tsao (formerly at Sandia National Laboratories) has decades of experience in fundamental research. In this talk, he discusses how corporate research once fused inspiration from real‑world utility with fundamental learning and discovery, driving breakthroughs from semiconductors to information theory. Today that tradition lies dormant—yet its need has never been greater. Tsao presents a vision for “Bell Labs Xs”: a new funding and organizational architecture to revive use‑inspired learning and discovery, mobilize industry for the public good, and raise America’s R&D productivity to new heights.
Don’t Put All Your Labs in One Basket
Science policy is, at its core, an investment strategy. Over time, the balance of funding across institutions (universities, companies, nonprofits, and government labs), and mechanisms (project grants, investigator awards, institutional block grants, training programs, prizes) has shifted in ways that shape what kinds of discoveries we get. In this talk, Caleb Watney (co-founder of the Institute for Progress), looks at the past, present, and future of our scientific “portfolio” and discuss how policymakers should diversify it to maximize long-term progress.
Soon after the conference, IFP re-launched Macroscience, a newsletter about metascience ‘aimed at increasing the speed and effectiveness of American science"”
We are publishing videos of conference talks over the next several weeks. We’ll post videos on the RPI YouTube channel. 2025 talks will all be added to this specific playlist here.
Thanks to Big Think our conference media partner, for producing all these videos and The Engine of Progress, a special issue of Big Think exploring the people and ideas driving humanity forward.