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 does not 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 is meant to make.
STEMsaic Portal is a facilitated training program, not a lecture about outreach. We start by understanding each scientist's research and the results they want, then work backwards from that change to design engagement that fits. Individual scientists move through tailored workshops with online and professional supports, and we account for what is just as decisive as any framework: their resources, their capacity, their time, and the particular circumstances they work in.
The approach is grounded in training and certification through the Portal to the Public Network, the credential that lets STEMsaic carry this work wherever researchers are, local, regional, or national. It travels with the method, not a zip code.
Portal to the Public is a national framework for public engagement with science. STEMsaic Portal is informed by it and trained through it. It is not the network itself, and STEMsaic does not speak for it.
The Portal to the Public (PoP) Network is facilitated by the Institute for Learning Innovation (ILI), a partner on the original National Science Foundation grant that developed the framework. The strength of this work is the network and the many member organizations that practice and advance it. STEMsaic is proud to be one trained voice within it.
Visit the Portal to the Public Network →Public engagement lasts when it grows from who the scientist already is.
Five elements of a partnership design approach.
Multiple motivations coexist. Scientists, community members, and institutions each bring different reasons to engage. We design one set of activities that serves several goals at once.
Scientists step out of the expert role and into authentic relationship-building, moving from "let me teach you about my research" to "let me share what fascinates me and learn what matters to you."
Engagement is a designed sequence, not a one-time event: pre-engagement and co-design, hands-on interaction, and the infrastructure that sustains involvement and lets stories grow.
We watch for the moments that signal it is working, when a visitor says "I never thought I could understand this, but I do," or a scientist says "their questions made me think differently."
Impact reaches past knowledge transfer: STEM identity for individuals, trust and integrated local knowledge for communities, and durable engagement infrastructure for institutions.
STEMsaic Portal is led by Travis Tangen, who helped bring this work to UW-Madison and now carries it forward.
A certified Portal to the Public facilitator who co-founded UW-Madison's Portal to the Public chapter, the Wisconsin Idea STEM Fellows program, with two colleagues, drawing on methods refined across the network over many years.
He built that program as Research Impacts Director at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery (WARF), running public engagement at institutional scale.
As his co-founders moved on to other ventures or retired, Travis became the only active certified member carrying the methodology forward. STEMsaic Portal keeps that program's momentum moving, supporting the broader mission of the Portal to the Public Network with the talent and collaborative energy that STEMsaic brings together.
The microPlastics DJ.
Scientists leave this work with something built, not just planned. The projects range widely, from a researcher's first well-aimed public conversation to standout pieces like the microPlastics DJ, which turns real Raman spectra into a sound experience the public can feel. It is the method made tangible: rigorous research, in public, on the ear.
