Utah Research Institute
Our missions are:
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Being a platform for researchers to conduct meaningful R&D
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Creating educational and research opportunities
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Raising awareness for medical conditions and disabilities, and developing tech solutions to improve quality of life.
Utah Research Institute was founded in February of 2022 by Elizabeth Iazykova and Andrew Piskadlo. Our main mission is to be a unique platform, merging concepts of an educational institution and a business incubator. Our goal is to offer support, community, and direction to aspiring and established researchers.
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Both our executive and managing boards are proficient in STEM and research. We all had various experiences in academia and R&D, some good, some bad. URI was created to be an educational and R&D platform that unifies all the good qualities of institutions we have encountered throughout our careers. We want to make it possible for researchers to do research both as a hobby, as a career, and as a starting step in forming a business.
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Our future facility will include a hardware lab and workspace for all our researchers, teams, and other members, and will house a community of mentors and students.
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We also aim to open a k-12 school focused on tailored and innovative curriculums and educational strategies. Part of the curriculum will include interested students participating in research opportunities with URI’s more established teams and presenting their contributions at an annual URI student conference.
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What separates us from other educational institutions is the much fairer IP (intellectual property) agreement we offer our researchers. While established universities claim the majority IP from their researchers, we only take a small percentage of equity, with the opportunity for our in-house researchers to purchase it back using their research funding. This buy-back system circulates money back into the institute, allowing us to offer more opportunities to more people.
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This system is much fairer to the researchers and will become self-sustaining as our organization grows larger. But for now our primary sources of funding are grants and your donations. Please consider signing up as a member with monthly donations for an opportunity to be a part of our growing organization, or a one-time donation.
Our Team
We have created a strong board of likeminded individuals, all with backgrounds in science. As all nonprofit boards are fairly fluid, we are ensuring that every board member agrees with and embraces the institute's mission. This creates increased stability for our divisions and initiatives, and ensures long term existence of the organization.