STEMsaic Portal
A facilitated training program that helps individual scientists connect their research to the change they want to see, and build public engagement that lasts, delivered wherever researchers need it.
Told to engage. Never shown how.
Scientists are increasingly told to reach the public, broader impacts in a proposal, outreach in a tenure case, engagement as a civic duty. The instruction rarely comes with a method. Most are handed a template and a deadline, and asked to bolt public engagement onto work that was never framed for it.
Generic engagement doesn't hold. A talk that could be given by anyone, about anything, fades the week after. What lasts is engagement that starts from the researcher's own work and the specific change they want it to make. That is the part almost no program builds.
Start from the research, and the change it's meant to make.
STEMsaic Portal is a facilitated training program, not a lecture about outreach. STEMsaic starts by understanding each scientist's research and the results they want, then works backwards from that change to design engagement that fits. Individual scientists move through tailored workshops with online and professional supports. The design accounts for what is just as decisive as any framework: their resources, their capacity, their time, and the circumstances they work in.
The method comes from Portal to the Public, a national framework for public engagement with science. STEMsaic Portal is a member of the Portal to the Public Network, facilitated by the Institute for Learning Innovation, not the program itself. I am a certified facilitator, and I co-founded UW-Madison's chapter, the Wisconsin Idea STEM Fellows program, as Research Impacts Director at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery (WARF). As my co-founders moved to other ventures or retired, I became the only active member carrying the methodology forward, and STEMsaic Portal keeps that momentum moving. The credential travels with the method, local, regional, or national.
Public engagement lasts when it grows from who the scientist already is.
Real public-facing work, not good intentions.
Scientists leave with something built rather than planned. The projects range widely in ambition, from a researcher's first well-aimed public conversation to standout pieces like the microPlastics DJ, which turns Raman spectra into a sound experience the public can feel, or build-driven ventures in the spirit of SciBuilder.
First delivered at statewide scale in Wisconsin, STEMsaic Portal now runs wherever it's needed. It is the science:society interface at the level of the individual scientist: each researcher's own work, made legible and relevant to the public it serves.
