Dr. Fred Fraikor and Family

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Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Friend

Honored by:

Frederick J. Fraikor, PhD

Fred Fraikor was born and raised in a steel town near Pittsburgh, Pa. Working summers as a laborer in the steel mill; he graduated with a B.S. in Metallurgical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

After serving on active duty as a company commander and engineer at the U.S. Army Signal Corps Laboratories, he returned to academic studies at Ohio State University where he received his PhD in Metallurgical Engineering.

His first research position was with Dow Chemical Corporation at Rocky Flats where he was the first scientist to examine the metal plutonium and its alloys with transmission electron microscopy. Fred left Dow to become the first Dean of Engineering Technology at Metro State College before the construction of the Auraria campus. He subsequently became a Visiting Scientist at the Conservation and Analytical Laboratory of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. where he researched archaeological metal artifacts and art objects.

Upon his return to Colorado, Dr. Fraikor was an R&D manager and training director for Rockwell International Corporation and retired from Rocky Flats in 1992 to become a research professor and Director of the Colorado Advanced Materials Institute at the Colorado School of Mines. While directing that arm of a state agency, he won a $2.5m grant from the Department of Energy to initiate an innovative seed grant program, The Entrepreneur’s Technical Assistance Program, (ETAP) that provided grants to Colorado faculty and students to assist local entrepreneurs with research assistance for their inventions. Many of these small businesses are thriving in Colorado.

Dr. Fraikor retired from Mines in 2008 as the acting Director of Technology Transfer and as Research Professor in Metallurgical Engineering. He assisted the Mines Geology Museum as liaison and technical researcher on analyzing art and archaeological objects with the Denver Art Museum (DAM). One project was the restoration of a very valuable 19th century landscape painting of Yosemite Park by Albert Bierstadt that was donated to the School by a miner in the 1930s. It was expertly restored by conservators at the DAM and is on public display in the Western Collection of the museum.

Fred currently writes fly fishing articles and fiction and travels with his wife, Judy Jones.