The Wise Caterpillar of Science
Inspired by Absolem — the all-knowing caterpillar from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland — Abscilem, too, aspires for wisdom, transformation, and the pursuit of absolute knowledge.
Meet the People Behind Abscilem
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Alexandra Borissova Saleh, PhD
Chief Science Officer
Alexandra has spent her career on both sides of science communication. As a researcher, she earned a PhD in physical chemistry, studying chemical bonding through high-resolution X-ray crystallography, and published 35 papers. As a journalist, she has written more than 400 stories for Wired Italia, Forbes, Medscape and Science Focus, in English, Italian and Russian, and won several national awards for science writing.
She has also built science communication from the ground up: a university’s first communications office, a popular-science website that reached 256,000 readers in its first six months, and a Master’s programme and online course in science communication with more than 1,100 graduates. She has taught at Hochschule Rhein-Waal, Hochschule München and the University of Pavia, and coached researchers — including the director of a Max Planck Institute — on presenting their work.
In Europe she is a German Chancellor Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, served as board member and treasurer of the PCST Network, founded the PCST Award, and led the 2020 European Conference of Science Journalists in Trieste (600+ participants). In 2026 she was named an EMBO Maria Leptin Science Journalism Fellow.
At Abscilem she makes sure every message is scientifically accurate and every audience — investors, funders, journalists — receives the research in a form it can act on.
Works in English, Italian, Russian and German.
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Tania Zhiduoli
Head of Strategy & Growth
Tania is not a scientist, and that is the point. For more than fifteen years she has worked on the side of the table where investors, partners and customers sit — deciding whether a complex product is worth their attention.
She took Italian industrial technology to a new market from scratch: supplier negotiations, positioning, pricing, marketing strategy, sales. At Knauf Insulation she led digital across several European countries, building the digital strategy on market analysis. At Hays she ran the Salary Guide — a research-data platform — and automated how its data was collected. At Alshaya she worked on the online growth of Starbucks, The Body Shop and Mothercare. She has also founded and run two businesses of her own, so she knows how a launch feels from the inside.
At Abscilem she leads market research, go-to-market strategy and growth: who your audience is, what they need to hear, and where they will find you.
Works in English, Italian and Russian.
Why We Exist
We watched it happen too many times to ignore it.
A researcher spends a decade on something genuinely important. The data is there. The results are real. And then they walk into a room full of investors or policymakers — people who could do something with the work — and the connection just doesn’t happen. Not because the science isn’t good enough. Because nobody had helped them tell the story in a way the room could receive.
That’s the gap Abscilem was built to close. We’ve spent our careers sitting on both sides of it — close enough to the science to understand what makes it significant, and close enough to the market to understand what makes people act. Most agencies don’t have both. Most science communicators don’t either. We built Abscilem because that combination didn’t exist in the form researchers needed it, and we were tired of watching important work go unseen.
What Guides Us
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Scientific Integrity
We never oversimplify. Every message we craft is accurate, honest, and faithful to the science that produced it.
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Partnership, Not Outsourcing
We work alongside you, not above you. You bring the science. We bring the language to carry it further.
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Global Perspective
From Tbilisi to Tel Aviv, from Berlin to Cape Town — we understand that good scientific communication looks different depending on where the conversation is happening.
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Rooted in Europe
Based in Rome, we serve researchers and institutions across Europe, the Middle East, post-Soviet innovation hubs, and beyond.
Based in Italy. Serving the World.
We work with clients across multiple regions and languages. Our team communicates fluently in English, Italian, German, and Russian.
- Western Europe
- Central & Eastern Europe
- Israel
- UAE & Saudi Arabia
- Georgia
- Kazakhstan
- Uzbekistan
- Azerbaijan
- South Africa
Let’s Work Together
Whether you’re a professor with a breakthrough discovery or a university looking to amplify your research portfolio — we’d love to hear from you.
We answer within one business day