About Us

The UNO STEM Teaching, Research, and Inquiry-based Learning (TRAIL) Center exists to elevate human potential by creating innovations in formal and informal STEM education. The center synergizes research with educational excellence by providing faculty with ready-built infrastructure for enhancing the broad impacts of their research, building teams to tackle institutional and educational challenges, and cultivating community partners to support UNO’s Carnegie Community Engaged elective classification. Our approach fosters social mobility by building strong STEM employees and engaged citizens.

We operationalize the UNO STEM Strategic Plan, which was developed through the work of 65 faculty, staff, and administrators representing all six academic colleges. Working together, we charted a path for the creation of cross-disciplinary support systems and the consolidation of overlapping activity, with a special focus on collaboration rather than competition.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Strategic Pillars

The Center has adopted the following three strategic pillars:

1. educational innovation,
2. sustainability, and
3. impact on investment.

These pillars clarify what we do--and what we don’t--as an organization. They guide our decision-making at all levels, from which major projects to undertake, to day-to-day decisions like which activities to include in our outreach programs. Every discussion at the Center starts with the question: “What impact will we make today?," and we filter every decision through these pillars.

First, we take seriously our mission to create innovations. This focus on answering unanswered questions and developing novel solutions vertically integrates our research with our outreach and workforce development activities. For example, our outreach programming serves as a sandbox for educational research and infrastructure for innovative undergraduate and workforce experiential and service learning.

Our focus is on uncovering funadamental truths about teaching and learning that can be scaled to create innovations for the public good beyond our campus.

Second, we take an entrepreneurial approach that ensures our activities are sustainable long-term, both financially and logistically. This ensures that we do not overextend staff and resources on activities with minimal potential impact. This focus on sustainability informs our funding model: our fee-for-service programming provides consistent revenue to support our dedicated full-time staff, with our research and programming for underserved groups scaling based on direct and indirect dollars provided by our generous funders. Currently, Center operations are 96% funded through revenue and external awards and 4% funded through state-aided dollars.

We create massive impacts for the Nebraska STEM workforce at almost no cost to taxpayers.

Finally, we expect that everything we do will generate positive impacts on the people we serve and beyond. Similar to a business working to maximize return-on-investment (ROI), we seek to maximize impact-on-investment (IOI). This means that we must be entrepreneurial in our approach and driven by consistent measurement of and response to impact metrics. The time and treasure of our faculty, staff, and partners is finite, which means decisions must be made on their allocation.

We decide what we do--and what we don't--based on the impacts we can have on real people.

Our Model Works

Over the past two years, the Center has increased our total external awards by 192%, and we currently support more than $6.6M across 14 active awards with 32 different principle investigators (PIs) and Co-PIs. Research teams represent 12 departments, four colleges, and several corporate and non-profit partners. Every dollar we raise goes toward creating innovations in STEM education, and therefore, to elevating the potential of real people across the Omaha metro area. This includes the over 12,000 community members we directly impact each year.

To learn more, read the UNO STEM Strategic Plan.