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For EPIIC teams, NSF CAREER faculty, workforce development programs, and STEM Partnership programs

You are building something real for science and society. The question is, could you use a little support to help influence what happens next.

Your team put partnerships together that did not exist before. Advisory relationships. Industry contacts who actually answer. Faculty who know how to hold the middle of a collaboration together. Pathways students can walk. Not all of this is written down as a capability. It lives in the people who did it, alongside everything else you do.

So the next question is this one. When the grant is finished, needs a spark, or when it never landed, does the partnership work keep moving because your team knows how to move it, or does it slow down because the structure carrying it was a grant?

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Lab groups run all year long with the focus of activities in line with the academic calendar. The Fall 2026 Lab Themes get fully underway in September.

The STEM Partnership Labs are where the work keeps moving.

Two things keep it moving: professional support around the staff and faculty who carry the work, inside the grant or long past it. Get help turning the project and partnership ideas your team already has into the next grant proposal. The Labs help this work happen, and they do it across agencies and different NSF lines, whether that is a regional coalition, an Engines award, a Hub, a workforce grant, or a research proposal that did not land the first time.

The goals can be mapped at different levels. You on your own, designing partnerships around your own research. Your department building a shared pathway. Your whole campus working with industry, community and education partners at once. And it is the same goal across practices, because planning an NSF CAREER award is this work, and so is carrying one out once the STEM partnerships inside it have to run for real.

Every lab runs inside the same larger community guided by integrated webinars to facilitate using the resources. Multiple interactives, resources, and topical STEM Partnership development team guides move through the academic calendar. One STEMsaic Team Guide runs at a time for everyone, with the workbooks, the interactive tools, and new content moving through on a steady rhythm.

Whichever of the four STEM Partnership Labs you are in is where that shared material gets tailored and pointed at your specific purpose. Here are the four STEM Partnership Lab themes.

Four Labs run this academic year.

Grant Development Turn the partnership ideas you already have into the next proposal. Read the full description → Professional Development Keep support around your staff and faculty, inside the grant and after it. Read the full description → CAREER Applicants Write your education plan and research as one design before the deadline. Read the full description → CAREER Awardees Deliver the broader impacts you promised without a second job. Read the full description →

Every seat is the same price whichever Lab you pick: $75 a month, or $750 for the year, which saves 17%. The fall semester opens September 15.

See the full syllabus →

STEM Partnership Labs: Grant Development Theme and Ongoing Professional Support Theme

Two different themes fit your reasons to be there. One of the two statements below might already be yours.

STEM Partnership Lab: Grant Development for Partnership Programs (across disciplines)

“Our grant is ending, and the next partnership is unfunded.”

Lab Focus: who this lab is for

You run a program that put students into partnership work, and it worked. You have partners who answer your email, a funding line that ends, and a next proposal you can see but nobody to write with. This lab theme shares openly: say what you are building and what partner it would take, and STEMsaic brokers introductions across all four labs. Team seats lead here. Bring whoever writes, designs, and implements with you.

A semester that expands the partnership ideas your team already has into funding: from a working relationship, to a submitted proposal, to reporting a program officer can read without calling you.

Built on: Partnership to Proposal and Proposal to Reporting, with evaluation design from Participatory Evaluation for Researchers where a proposal needs it.

Your team leaves with: a proposal-ready partnership design and the evaluation plan that goes with it.

$75 a month a seat, or $750 for the year.

Reserve your seat →
STEM Partnership Lab: Professional Development & Support to Sustain your Partnership Programs

“What we built has to outlive the grant.”

Lab Focus: who this lab is for

Your partnership cohort ended and you hope the practices can survive. You still run partner intake the way you learned to. Nobody else in your building does, so when a piece breaks there is no one to ask. This STEM Partnership Lab theme runs as a clinic and show-and-tell: bring something of yours, working or broken, both count. STEMsaic hosts. Individual and teams are welcome.

A semester of professional support around the people who carry the partnership, your program staff and your faculty, turning what they built into structure the institution runs on its own: the pathway, the courses, the partnership architecture.

Built on: Layered Partnership Design and Workforce Development Pathways, with Partnership Idea Sparks for sector-specific design work.

Your team leaves with: a documented pathway and partnership design your institution can run without STEMsaic.

$75 a month a seat, or $750 for the year.

Reserve your seat →
What both labs include

Both labs open with the same kickoff working session, where your team names the outcome it is chasing. A live keystone session anchors each module of the season. Office hours run twice a month across both labs together, which is where the real snags get solved: the partner who went quiet, the memo of understanding nobody will sign, the timeline that stopped making sense. Individual seats get one private working session with STEMsaic's founder, Travis Tangen; team blocks get two. Every seat carries the full toolkit, all eight Team Guides, all sixty-eight interactive tools, and every workbook, for the full academic year, plus a private channel named for each lab and a shared alumni channel that stays live after your season ends.

How deep you go is your call

A seat is yours to use at your own depth, and the depth is not a commitment you make in advance. Some people work the workbooks alone and never speak in a session. Some read the sequenced emails as they land and come back to everything else in January. Some are in the room every time. All three are legitimate ways to hold a seat. Nobody is tracking which one you picked, nothing is withheld from the quiet version, and presence is offered here, never expected.

The same goes for when you arrive. Everything already published opens the day you walk in, and the sequenced emails start you at the beginning at your own pace. Nobody is behind, because there is nothing to be behind on.

And if your team already knows how to work together, whether that is an EPIIC team, a coalition spanning four organizations, or any group that has been in the room with each other before, you can run your own cohort rhythm inside the Lab: your own channel, your own pace, the live sessions as a backstop rather than the spine. Say so at kickoff and we will set the room up that way.

See the full syllabus → for the module-by-module breakdown of what a season actually covers.

“The partnership work outlives the grant, or it does not.” A semester is enough time to decide which.

The fall semester opens September 15.

CAREER is the National Science Foundation's award for early-career faculty, and it is the one that will not take a research plan on its own. It asks you to integrate research and education into a single plan and then reviews you on both. In most drafts the education plan and the broader impacts get written last, separately from the science, and it shows on the page. This Lab works your actual CAREER plan until the two read as one design instead of two documents stapled together.

STEM Partnership Lab: NSF CAREER Applicant - Designing your Broader Impacts

Lab Focus: who this lab is for

You have a submission date and a research plan you could defend in your sleep. The broader impacts and education plan reads like somebody else wrote it at eleven at night. Some of you may be reviewed in the same panel, so the norm for this lab theme is simple: share methods, never aims. STEMsaic teaches this room as a workshop that directly folds into your proposal development activities. Individual seats or campus cohorts are welcome here.

You are drafting for the next deadline. Most people arrive saying I need help with the broader impacts section, or my education plan reads like it belongs to a different grant. Either one fits this Lab theme.

STEM Partnership Lab: NSF CAREER Awardees - Implementing your Broader Impacts

Lab Focus: who this lab is for

You won it, congrats! Five years. The broader impacts plan was written with the reviewers in mind, and now it has to be run by people who did not write it: the postdoc named in the education plan, the graduate students who inherited an outreach commitment with partners. Nobody here is competing, so it is the most open lab theme of the four. STEMsaic convenes, pointing your questions to make real-time impacts. Individual and campus teams. Bring whoever your Broader Impacts plan names.

You won it, and now the broader impacts and education plan has to happen alongside the research, the teaching and the tenure clock.

If your campus runs a CAREER cohort or a proposal-development program, congrats and you are lucky to have such a great resource. Your office knows your institution, your deadlines and your community in a way STEMsaic never will. The NSF CAREER lab themes are built to sit alongside this support. Bring what you build here back to them. That is the point.

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Want to go further with customized services?

Custom curriculum for your department or campus. The Team Guide material rebuilt as your course or professional development sequence. See it →

Custom grant support. Partnership-forward development on one submission: the design, the evaluation plan, the broader impacts, the letters. See it →

Kiosk builds. Your STEM partnership map running unattended on a screen in a hallway or part of a workshop. See it →

Start a grant or custom project →

Let STEMsaic know the proposal you are chasing or the work you need built, and we will tell you if we might be a fit to collaborate.

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