Innovate State is a collaboration between the Burgess Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation and the MSU Innovation Center.

Hosted in the Entrepreneurship Lab, Innovate State welcomes successful Spartan alumni back to campus for a fireside chat. Guests share their perspectives on everything from launching startups to experiencing success and failure to building dynamic and nurturing work cultures.

Sheela has more than 20 years of experience in building and implementing educational technology solutions in K-12 classrooms. At CueThink, Sheela and her team have successfully taken the vision of a peer platform for math problem solving and built and deployed a scalable application to foster critical thinking and collaboration skills. As Founder and CEO, Sheela has been instrumental in securing $3M from the National Science Foundation, NewSchools Venture Fund, MassVentures, and angel investors. She has been successful in fostering partnerships with leading Math groups and selling to school districts across the country. Prior to CueThink, Sheela was Project Director at Pearson Education, focusing on technologically innovative assessment items based on Common Core State Standards. Before that, Sheela was Director of Technology at CAST, where she spearheaded numerous technical products including CAST eReader and Thinking Reader. She has been a member of various consortiums such as Web Access Initiative (WAI), National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS) and Open eBook Forum. Sheela has also been a podcaster for the Stanford Business School’s Center for Social Innovation.