Julian Elliot, CEO Covidence

In this episode, we sit down with Julian Elliott, infectious disease physician turned founder of the global evidence platform Covidence, to unpack how the world makes sense of science in an era overflowing with information - and misinformation. Julian explains how his years working in HIV care in Cambodia exposed a critical problem: clinicians often couldn’t access the research they needed to make the best decisions for patients. That experience ultimately set him on the path to building Covidence, a platform now used by governments and academics worldwide to cut through the 'firehose' of scientific slop and fraud. Julian reflects on Covidence’s evolution from a machine-learning research project into a nonprofit powering rigorous evidence synthesis, and why LLMs, while transformative, still fall short when it comes to producing high fidelity, reproducible scientific understanding.