Candidate | Search for the Executive Director of the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management

Scott Shrake is associate vice president for economic development and strategic partnerships at Colorado State University and executive director of the Institute for Entrepreneurship in the College of Business. An engineer, entrepreneur, and academic executive, he builds interdisciplinary programs that connect students across engineering, computer science, business, and beyond with industry and community partners through design and entrepreneurship.

Since joining Colorado State in 2018, Shrake has grown the Institute for Entrepreneurship from a single student employee to a 12.5-person team, built a venture development platform, and secured more than $7.5 million in external funding, including $3.5 million in philanthropic support and a $1 million endowment. He established the institute’s 16-member advisory council of alumni and business leaders; is principal investigator for the university's partnership in the National Science Foundation I-Corps Hub West, which named CSU Partner of the Year in 2023; and co-developed the REACH climate hard tech accelerator with Innosphere and the CSU Energy Institute. 

In the Office of the President, he has advised on university strategy, served as interim associate vice president of CSU Extended Campus, which has 70 FTE and $55 million in revenue; co-created the CSU Climate Initiative; and launched CSU Snow Days, a university-wide celebration of Colorado’s outdoor recreation economy.

Before his time at Colorado, Shrake spent five years as an engineering faculty member in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, where he directed the Engineering Projects in Community Service program and the Fulton Entrepreneurial Ventures Program, raised more than $4.7 million, and led an initiative to embed an entrepreneurial mindset across 20,000 engineering students.

Shrake has taught more than 40 course sections in design thinking, entrepreneurship, strategy, and project-based engineering design. Shrake holds a bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree in civil engineering from the University of Pittsburgh, where he was an NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Fellow. 

CV available upon request.

Nique Fajors is director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the Trulaske College of Business at the University of Missouri. At the center, Fajors builds partnerships among student founders, venture investors, donors and corporations, and leads a strategy to place Missouri among the nation’s top 30 undergraduate entrepreneurship programs. 

Fajors helped secure a $4 million gift for the university’s student-managed venture fund and is principal investigator on a $1.7 million U.S. Economic Development Administration proposal to build entrepreneurial capacity across 14 Northeast Missouri counties.

Fajors has more than 20 years of leadership in technology, entertainment, and consumer businesses. As executive vice president at Premium Retail Services, he led product launch and retail execution for Google hardware, including Chromebook, Pixel, and Google TV, and built a virtual sales platform and an AI agent pilot with Google Cloud. Prior to this, he co-founded and led One Spear Entertainment, a mobile games publisher that was later acquired, and served as chief operating officer of Vector Entertainment and as vice president at Capcom and Atari. 

A three-time entrepreneur, he has raised more than $10 million in capital. In public service, he was senior policy advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce and a detailee at the White House.

Fajors has more than a decade of university teaching and entrepreneurial leadership, including the MBA@Rice program at Rice University and the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. A TEDx speaker and author of Cultural and Economic Revitalization, he has been quoted in the New York Times, Financial Times, and BusinessWeek.

Fajors holds a bachelor's degree in computer information systems from Suffolk University and a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School where he was a Time Warner Scholar.

CV available upon request.

Luís Lamb is special advisor for AI engagement in the AI Innovation Institute at Stony Brook University. He is an academic and industry leader with a 20-year record of building, scaling, and sustaining organizations, programs, and partnerships across higher education, government, and technology. 

Prior to Stony Brook University, Lamb was at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. As vice dean, and later dean of the Institute of Informatics, one of Brazil’s top computer science programs, he led a 75-plus-faculty, 1,200-student college to top national ratings, increased admissions, and oversaw the hiring of new faculty and the implementation of inclusive admissions over a ten-year period. As vice president for research, he secured the university’s largest research grant and created its first undergraduate research scholarship program for underrepresented students. 

Lamb has also served in government. As secretary of innovation, science and technology, he re-established the department of innovation, science and technology, grew it from two to more than 75 staff and its budget to over $20 million, built eight regional innovation ecosystems, and chaired the state’s COVID-19 Scientific Committee. 

He has deep, technical credibility as a pioneer of neuro-symbolic AI, has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, and was a recent senior AI leader at The Boeing Company, where he led AI and machine learning teams.

A sustained commitment to undergraduate education and entrepreneurship runs throughout his career. He helped design the founding curriculum of the Institute of Technology and Computing, a new Latin American computer science school; taught Impact Ventures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Legatum Center, now Kuo Sharper Center; and mentors early-stage founders at the Creative Destruction Lab in the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington, Seattle.

He holds a bachelor's and master's degree in computer science from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, a doctorate in computer science from Imperial College London, and Master of Business Administration from the MIT Sloan Fellows Program.

CV available upon request.