Research and outreach

Centers and institutes

The technology-facing centers profiled below are the largest by funding. The full centers & labs index lists all 28 named centers, institutes, and applied laboratories, each with its own page.

Center for Advanced Manufacturing

The largest research operation on campus by both funding and headcount — roughly $4.1 million of last year's $11.4 million in external funding ran through it. The center's standing model is a sponsored contract with a named regional manufacturer: a company pays for a specific automation, robotics, or process-improvement problem to get solved, a faculty lead and a small team of funded graduate assistants and undergraduates work it for one to three semesters, and the manufacturer gets the deliverable along with first right to hire whoever worked it. The Plastics Engineering program's donated injection molding line and the Manufacturing Engineering program's ten-year workforce pipeline agreement both grew out of relationships the center built first. Every graduate assistant in the center is fully funded; undergraduates are paid hourly, not credit-only.

Rural Health Research Institute

Studies access and outcomes in rural health systems across western Wesconsin, in partnership with three regional hospital networks under a five-year data-sharing agreement renewed on a rolling basis. Current standing projects track rural emergency-department wait times against staffing models and a longitudinal study of rural maternal-health outcomes now in its fourth year of data collection. Nursing and Health Information Management undergraduates work in the institute starting sophomore year, most commonly on de-identified data cleaning and coding before moving into analysis by junior year.

Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Lab

Runs sanctioned penetration testing and security assessments for small municipal utilities and school districts that cannot otherwise afford one — supervised, credited coursework for Cybersecurity majors, never a live production system without a signed engagement letter and a named point of contact at the client organization. The lab completed nineteen engagements last year, up from twelve the year before, and maintains a waiting list of municipalities rather than actively soliciting new ones.

Applied Materials & Polymer Research Group

A smaller, newer group spun out of the Plastics Engineering and Packaging Technology programs, working on recycled-content packaging formulations and injection-molding process optimization with regional consumer-goods manufacturers. Most projects are one semester and undergraduate-led, with a faculty advisor rather than a faculty principal investigator — the group's stated purpose is giving students a first authorship credit, not running a large standing lab.

Undergraduate research

Roughly 410 undergraduates worked on funded research or a sponsored applied project last year, most starting by their sophomore year — this is a polytechnic, so undergraduate research generally means lab or field work, not reading about someone else's. About 60% of that funding traces back to Center for Advanced Manufacturing contracts; the rest is split across the other centers, small internal grants, and faculty-led projects with no center affiliation at all.

Bring a project to Porter

Companies, agencies, and communities start through the Discovery Center, the single front door for outside organizations. It scopes the problem, matches it to the right center, course, or capstone team, handles the agreement, and manages the work to a deliverable. See For employers & partners for the full menu, from hiring co-op students to sponsoring a capstone to custom workforce training.

Open resources for researchers

Porter is committed to open scholarship. Faculty and student researchers use, and contribute to, free infrastructure maintained by the wider research community:

• ORCID — a free persistent researcher ID; set one up before your first publication.
• Open Science Framework — project management, preregistration, and sharing.
• Zenodo — a CERN-hosted repository for datasets and code, with DOIs.
• arXiv and PubMed Central — open preprint and full-text archives.
• Grants.gov and NSF — federal funding opportunities the Office of Research helps you navigate.

The open resources guide has the full set, including open data and tools, and the library runs an open-access publishing fund for Porter authors.

Extension and outreach

The university runs workshops, clinics and technical assistance for regional employers and school districts across eleven counties, most of it free or at cost. The largest recurring program is a fall manufacturing-skills workshop series run jointly with the Center for Advanced Manufacturing, typically drawing 30–40 regional employer staff per session.