Tom Estad

Biography

Tom Estad is a lecturer in 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, Tom’s other passions are entrepreneurship and sustainability. He’s taught courses and led workshops on pitching to investors, and has led multiple business study missions to Scandinavia, Southeast Asia, and New Zealand, where students learned about businesses and their challenges/opportunities in these regions.

Tom has coached industry and student teams in shaping their pitches for competitions, including the winning team from Brookhaven National Laboratories, which placed first in the Department of Energy’s Office of Technology Transitions National Lab Accelerator Pitch Event 2021, and Photonect, the Grand Prize Winner of the New York Business Plan Competition, 2022.

Tom taught for three decades in Singapore, first with the National University of Singapore, teaching technical communication for engineering majors and professional writing for English majors, and then with Singapore Management University, teaching management communication.

Tom served as Associate Dean, Undergraduate Programmes for the Lee Kong Chian School of Business 2011-2017, and as Academic Director for the
SUTD – SMU Dual Degree Programme 2013-2018.

Recent Courses

• HADM 1650 - Business Writing for Hospitality Professionals
• MGMT 5680 - Management Communication
• NBA 5680 - Management Presentations
• NBA 5670 - Management Writing

Academic Degrees

• MA English, Iowa State University, 1985
• BS Education, Mayville State University, 1982