Etalia, inspired by the Latin Et alia, meaning “and others.”
At Etalia, we believe science communication is more than a necessity—it’s a powerful tool for growth, connection, and fulfillment.
About Etalia
Science-driven organizations have inherited two traditions that were never built for what communication can actually do. 1) From corporate practice: communication that arrives after strategy is set and decisions are made — treated as an end in itself rather than a means to one. 2) From science communications: a dissemination model, where findings are produced first and communicated after. Both treat communication as a delivery mechanism.
But that's not all communication is. Fundamentally, communication is how humans forge the connections that open doors, build the relationships that matter, and create the conditions that make ambition achievable — and when scientific organizations learn to harness it that way, it becomes one of the most powerful forces available to them. That's the premise Etalia was founded on, and Science Relations is the framework we built to put it into practice.
We are co-founders and spouses. We built Etalia together because our work turns out to be two expressions of the same conviction.
Meet our
Co-Founders
Paul Jenson
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. → READ MORE
Carolyn Barnwell
Where Paul works from the outside in — starting with the strategic landscape and building toward the insight that belongs in public — Carolyn works from the inside out.
Her premise is simple: what most leaders experience as pressure is often a quiet disconnection from their own voice and purpose. Most of what blocks a leader from showing up with full clarity, conviction, and presence isn’t a skill gap. It’s an obstruction — the accumulated weight of high-stakes work, the habits of caution that serious professional training instills, the widening gap between what a leader knows and what they’re able to say out loud when it matters most.
Carolyn’s work is to remove what’s in the way — because Science Relations begins not with an audience, but with the leader’s own internal clarity about who they are, what they believe, and what they are here to say. → READ MORE
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.