Biography
Tom Estad is an assistant teaching professor of management communication at the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration and the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.
In addition to management communication, Estad focuses on entrepreneurship and sustainability. He has taught courses and led workshops on pitching to investors and has led business study missions to Scandinavia, Southeast Asia and New Zealand, where students learned about regional business environments and their challenges and opportunities.
Estad has coached industry and student teams in developing pitches for major competitions, including the winning team from Brookhaven National Laboratory, which placed first in the Department of Energy’s Office of Technology Transitions National Lab Accelerator Pitch Event in 2021, and Photonect, the grand prize winner of the New York Business Plan Competition in 2022.
Before joining Cornell, Estad spent three decades teaching in Singapore. He taught technical communication for engineering majors and professional writing for English majors at the National University of Singapore, and later taught management communication at Singapore Management University. He served as associate dean for undergraduate programs in the Lee Kong Chian School of Business from 2011 to 2017 and as academic director for the SUTD/SMU Dual Degree Programme from 2013 to 2018.
Education
MA Iowa State University, 1985 BS Mayville State University, 1982