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About Phaeton Group

Phaeton Dinosaur Team at Cliff All Together Now:
The Multi-Disciplinary Approach

Phaeton Group is a science and consulting organization that carries out research and provides communications services to media and educational clients. Phaeton unites experts in over a dozen fields relating to natural science, history, and exploration, and teams them with top-ranked artists, photographers, and designers to create superb media products. Dedicated to a multi-disciplinary approach in the face of today's increasing specialization, Phaeton team members share broad interests and a respect for work outside their own fields. We enjoy collaborating with each other and we value the fresh perspectives our colleagues bring to our projects.


Dedication To Public Outreach

Phaeton Group believes in the value of public communication and in reaching out beyond a traditional academic audience. Our scholarly experts therefore write not only for academic presses and journals, but also for popular book publishers and magazines. We present our lectures not only at scientific conferences, but also at museums, libraries, classrooms, and corporate offices. We believe that making our work more accessible promotes greater appreciation of the value of our fields of study. In the face of the alarming state of general public knowledge about science and history, we believe that public outreach is not just an option but a duty.

Media Savvy

To our academic credentials we add best-selling experience in communications. Alongside Phaeton's academics stand master artists and photographers, and the graphics and layout professionals who help us present our work in an engaging fashion that everyone can understand--yet without sacrificing intellectual standards and resorting to the dreaded expedient of "dumbing it down." So we help the Discovery Channel get its dinosaur science right on TV. We help the Archaeological Institute of America teach archaeology to kids in their youth magazine. For adult publishers we've gone deep into NASA to pull out the full story of the Apollo missions to the Moon. We translated the dense aerospace engineering jargon into clear and accurate accounts that bring the full magnitude of the Apollo accomplishment to life.

Experts and Artists Working Together

We don't have the translation problems so often found in the "expert versus the media" situations--because our experts and our media people are all on the same team. At Phaeton they are often one and the same individual, combining experience in both fields. Our director Dr. David West Reynolds holds a Ph.D. in Archaeology, but also a record of New York Times best-selling popular books that have sold in the millions. Our media experience includes work with top Hollywood studios such as Paramount Pictures and Lucasfilm Ltd. as well as high-profile media outlets such as the BBC and Voice of America. We've helped cut MTV music videos and served as creative consultants for major international marketing campaigns--not the usual work for a bunch of professors and engineers, but that's Phaeton Group.

Enlightenment and Excitement

There is tremendous excitement inherent in our fields: there is discovery, and challenge, and adventure of every type. Our academic credentials are now solid enough that we don't have to hide from this part of our work, and pretend that it is all dull and mundane so that we will be taken seriously. We don't have to try to look boring in order to fit in. Our scholars have won major Federal grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation, and they have been Fellows at the American Academy in Rome, among many other worthy academic achievements. That background of respectable peer-reviewed accomplishment affords most of us the liberty to be candid about our experiences without it jeopardizing our careers. It allows us to invest our communications with the passion that we feel, and to explore wherever our inquiries take us without worrying about how it will look to a committee. We've done our time and proven ourselves, and shown that if we choose to talk to the public, it is not because we can't handle academic standards, but because we believe in talking to the public. We therefore work to convey not just information, but the spirit of inquiry and the thrill of discovery. We are dedicated to sharing both the enlightenment and the excitement of our work. And we enjoy the freedom to use our communications skills in doing so.


Phaeton North America Most Phaeton Group members have day jobs at Universities, federal agencies, or professional corporations according to their fields of expertise. Individuals collaborate on Phaeton projects that call for their particular talents. Our staff are presently located across North America, in Canada and the United States, and in the United Kingdom. Volunteers render assistance from locations around the world. Phaeton UK

 

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