Outreach Partners

Outreach Partners are the venues and organizations that make outreach repeatable for the U.S. National Science Foundation Center for Molecularly Optimized Networks (NSF MONET). The Center does not build its own audiences: it brings research-based activities to institutions that already have them, and returns to the same partners year after year.

Why this matters

A center-scale outreach commitment — two informal science communication events per participating institution per year — only works if trainees have somewhere to go. Standing partnerships remove the hardest part of outreach from the trainee's plate: finding an audience, securing a venue, and recruiting participants.

The exchange runs both directions. Partners receive tested, research-based activities with facilitator guidance and assessment tools that a library branch or elementary school cannot develop on its own. NSF MONET receives recurring access to audiences of a known size and age range, which is what makes measurement across events possible at all.

Documented reach

Measure	Documented value
Outreach events on record	60 tracked events, of which 42 have been held
Distinct partner venues	49
States represented	11, plus virtual delivery
NSF MONET institutions contributing trainees	10 universities, including Columbia, Duke, MIT, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, UIUC, Washington, UCSD, and Morehouse
International and external kit recipients	13 institutions across three continents

The partner network

Professional societies and national programs

The multi-year relationship with the American Chemical Society Kids Zone is the Center's deepest partnership: NSF MONET has staffed Kids Zone installations at national meetings in New Orleans (2024), San Diego (2025), Atlanta (spring 2026), and Chicago (fall 2026), with activities changing each year while the partnership persists. The American Physical Society soft matter division brought the Materials Science of Soccer kit to Squishy Science Sunday at the Minneapolis Convention Center (2024) and the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (2026), where the event was paired with an APS teachers' day so lesson plans could reach local classrooms. The MIT Museum's Cambridge Science Festival has hosted NSF MONET twice, including the debut of both revised 2.0 kits. Additional society and program partners include Science Olympiad and the Multiverse Concert Series, the collaborator behind the Musical Mechanophores activity.

Museums and science centers

Recorded partnerships include the Fleet Science Center in San Diego (2024, and again in 2026 with BeWise), the Maryland Science Center, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago for Junior Science Cafés, and Morehead Planetarium in North Carolina.

Schools, districts, and libraries

School partners span elementary through high school and several states: Stephen K. Hayt Elementary in Chicago, which has hosted three separate visits; Olive Chapel Elementary, Seawell Elementary, Section Elementary, and Rogers Herr Middle School in North Carolina; Bird Rock Elementary in La Jolla; Seattle Hebrew Academy; Kingsley Montessori School and the Sarah Greenwood Dual Language School in Boston; Eliot-Hine Middle School in Washington, DC; and the Barack and Michelle Obama Academy in Atlanta. The White Marsh branch of the Baltimore County Public Library hosted two kit sessions within two weeks in spring 2026.

Community organizations

Community partners reach audiences that campus events do not: the Carole Robertson Center for Learning and the Pedersen-McCormick Boys and Girls Club in Chicago, the soccer program DC Way, and the United Moroccan American Association of Cleveland, where a NASA engineer ran the soccer kit with local youth. These events are smaller by design — 6 to 21 participants — and are where facilitation quality matters most.

Institutions that requested kits on their own

An open kit request form turns interest into a shipment without Center staffing. Recipients include Louisiana State University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Boston Scientific, Seattle Pacific University, Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, Williams College, Monmouth College, Trinity Washington University, Marshall University, the California State University Chancellor's Office, the United Moroccan American Association of Cleveland, and an independent homeschool educator. Research universities, undergraduate-focused colleges, industry, and community groups all appear on the same list.

What the pattern shows

The strongest evidence of partnership health is repetition. MIT appears four times in the event record, the Beckman Institute at UIUC three times, Hayt Elementary three times, and the University of Chicago, Northwestern, Duke, and the Baltimore County Public Library twice each. Partners that host once are testing the Center; partners that host repeatedly have integrated NSF MONET into their own programming.

Geographic and institutional spread follows the labs. Illinois, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Washington, California, and Maryland dominate the record because that is where NSF MONET trainees are — which means partnership growth and lab participation are the same problem.

What comes next

Documented next steps are the distribution of revised 2.0 kits to partner venues following the Cambridge pilot, and expansion of digital delivery: the Chemistry of Slime video game's first field test at an ACS Kids Zone event activated 71 digital participants, 33 of whom reached the tracked in-game achievement, giving partners a way to extend an activity past the length of a visit.