a STEMsaic Research Impacts LLC media property
Science and its research impacts does not happen in isolation. Science saves lives and opens understandings within and across worlds. These processes accumulate through time enacted through teams, through connections, through partnerships that bring the right people together at the right moment.
The problem is, most researchers never had direct support on how to efficiently design and implement those partnerships. You know your science. But translating that expertise into connections with communities, industry partners, policymakers, and funders? That's a different skill set entirely.
That's where STEMsaic comes in.
Our name says it: STEM + mosaic. A mosaic is made of individual pieces, each with its own color, its own shape, its own identity, that come together to create something that extends the impact possibilities and beauty more than any piece alone. That's the model for how STEM partnerships should work.
Each partner organization brings distinct expertise. The magic isn't in making everyone the same, it's in connecting different strengths so they reinforce each other. Individual identity maintained. Collective impact amplified. This is what STEMsaic brings to designing science:society interfaces, evaluation, and coaching: a way of thinking about partnerships that honors what each partner contributes while building something none could build alone.
How we work:
STEMsaic Research Impacts is a Limited Liability Corporation that activates its network to bring together the right expertise for each project, coordinating connections that serve the best interests of your team.
STEMsaic can serve as member of your team, our model requires that we support through embedded and participatory elements, bringing evaluation and design expertise especially around STEM partnership formation. This approach creates efficiency gains that most projects can't achieve on their own: you get the benefit of patterns learned across decades of STEM projects, without having to learn them the hard way yourself.
In addition we create team guides and the newsletter ‘The Partnership Designer’, both of which are a lot of effort. These resources started from two primary paths. 1. STEMsaic wanted to, but could not support all the individuals and teams that inquired about working together. 2. There was a high degree of synergy among the types of STEM Partnership challenges and broader impacts design questions that STEMsaic was consistently asked. In essence the team guides are a response to help support everyone and give you the tools, guidance and examples of lessons learned that might help you to more efficient successes in your current STEM partnerships.
About me:
As CEO, I'm involved in nearly every project. I've spent three decades translating between scientists, educators, community partners, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, and funders. I've been in the lab, in entrepreneurial incubators, the classroom, science centers, and tech transfer organizations. I’ve been in the rooms where partnerships get negotiated, funded, and sometimes fall apart.
I’ve contributed to 120+ funded projects that touch many of the federal agencies and across projects in every NSF directorate. Since launching STEMsaic, we've directly advised hundreds of researchers and partners on designing and developing science:society interfaces. We are proud team members supporting NSF TIP EPIIC projects building institutional partnership capacity, and as a project leader designing and implementing science:society interfaces on NOAA-funded marine debris research on microplastics in the Great Lakes.
A new world of working in the age of AI, people matter more now!
Across all of our workplaces the expectations and realities of a technology supported future is upon us. AI is capable of generating lists, templates, and more. But I’m excited for how much more important and impactful the human elements of STEM partnership work will become. AI can't read the room when your industry partner and your faculty collaborator are talking past each other. It can't tell you which community organizations might be able to follow through and which won't. It can't coach you through the nuances of the moments when a partnership is stuck.
STEMsaic’s purpose is to help you do this work and advance the science:society interface of your projects to communities, to industry, to policy, to the various publics.
Please be in touch and reach out and learn about the possibility of creating opportunities together.
Cheers,
Travis Tangen, CEO, STEMsaic Research Impacts LLC
The Partnership Designer is a newsletter from STEMsaic Research Impacts LLC. We help partners design STEM collaborations that have sums greater than their parts - efficiently implemented, meaningfully assessed, and designed for sustained impacts.