Each week, we feature a medical center employee. Today we meet:
- Name: Max Kuenstling
- Hometown: Waterloo, Iowa
- No. of years at UNMC: Almost eight years (Four and a half years as a student and three years in my current role)
Tell us about what you do here at UNMC.
I work in the Vice Chancellor for Research Office, where I serve as the director of grant programs and communication. I assist research leaders with the development and submission of large grant applications, with the most recent successes being the Great Plains IDeA-CTR and the Training, Simulation, and Quarantine Center (TSQC). I also oversee the research editorial office, which provides grant and manuscript editorial services to our faculty. Finally, I coordinate research communications from our office to keep the campus and the community updated on research resources, policies, training and funding opportunities.
Excellence is one of UNMC’s brand values. Tell us of a time you witnessed a person or group demonstrating excellence at UNMC.
As research at UNMC continues to grow (we reached $115.1 million in grants and contracts last year), I continuously see everyone in the research support offices going above and beyond their normal daily duties to ensure that our researchers on campus continue to have everything they need at their disposal to support their current research and to expand their studies to new areas of discovery. Often, when growth occurs rapidly, things can struggle to keep up; but these individuals continue to work hard every day to maintain the level of research excellence that keeps UNMC at the forefront of scientific discovery and ensures that UNMC remains a premier biomedical research institution in the region.
List three things people may not know about you.
- I love to mix traveling with learning. As part of a field biology course in college, I spent a month deep in the rainforests of Guyana and Trinidad, studying their ecology and biological diversity. I’ve also taken two separate trips throughout Europe to study the battlefields of WWI and WWII.
- I’ve planned on getting my private pilot’s license for a long time (but keep putting it off). Still, I have had the opportunity to pilot a number of planes, most recently with my wonderful wife arranging an opportunity for me to fly a Cessna around the Big Island of Hawai’i (with an instructor present, of course!).
- I enjoy building and doing projects with my hands, including renovating many things throughout our circa 1920s home.