About Etalia
Science-driven organizations have inherited two traditions that were never built for what communication can actually do.
From corporate practice, communication is treated as something that arrives after strategy is set and decisions are made—an instrument for promoting what already exists.From science communication, it is often treated as dissemination: findings are produced first, then explained afterward.
Both models treat communication as a delivery mechanism.
But communication is more than delivery. Fundamentally, it is how humans forge the connections that open doors, build the relationships that matter, and create the conditions that make ambition achievable.
When scientific organizations learn to harness communication that way, it becomes one of the most powerful forces available to them.
That is the premise Etalia was founded on—and the reason we developed the practice of Science Relations.
Science Relations treats communication not as a function, but as a leadership capability: the disciplined practice of cultivating the relationships that allow scientific insight to move—through institutions, across disciplines, and into the decisions that shape the world.
Meet our
Co-Founders
PAUL MARTIN JENSEN
Paul came to science the hard way. He grew up inside a global End Times movement — a total worldview, not merely a religion — in which the Earth was 6,000 years old, evolution was a lie, and a culture of both conspiracy and authority enforced absolute certainty about how the world would soon end.
Exposure to science gave him the tools to find his way out.
Navigating that path left him with something most strategists don't carry: a firsthand understanding of what it means to encounter evidence-based thinking across a genuine epistemological divide, and a deep sense of what's actually at stake when scientists fail to reach the people who need to hear them most.
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CAROLYN BARNWELL
Carolyn came to embodied leadership coaching the way most people come to it: by needing it herself.
She spent over twelve years working with National Geographic — first on staff, then as a contracted producer — where she produced its first digital series to feature scientists and researchers. The scientists she worked with gave her a reference point she's never lost: people who were genuinely leading with curiosity and alive in the discomfort of the unknown in ways that most professional culture trains out.
She also noticed the gap. The same leaders who were fearless in the field often went quiet in the moments that mattered most; sitting across from her in the TV studio with cameras rolling, at a podium, in a funding conversation. Their knowledge was vast. The gap was in the body.
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ON OUR NAME
Et alia is Latin for "and others." It appears at the end of academic citations — et al. — as shorthand for all the contributors whose names didn't fit in the reference.
We chose it because it points to something we think is both true and consequential: science is isolated. Not by accident, but by culture. Only a third of Americans can name a living scientist. The ivory tower is a cliché because it describes something real — a profession that is among the most important in the world, yet has not historically seen communication as central to its work.
Scientists are closer to the natural world, and to the frontier of human knowledge, than almost anyone. They should, by that measure, be the world's greatest communicators. Most aren't — not because they lack the capacity, but because no one has built the practice that makes it possible.
Scientific organizations — whether in industry, academia, or the nonprofit sector — need others to succeed. They need relationships with policymakers, stakeholders, funders, and publics who may never read a journal article but whose understanding, trust, and support determine what science can actually accomplish in society.
Etalia exists to help scientific organizations build the relationships, influence, and trust that their mission requires — and that science, as a force in the world, deserves.