Tom is the Director for Enterprise and Commercialisation at University College Dublin, where he leads innovation, entrepreneurship, and enterprise development at NovaUCD, Ireland’s premier incubator / accelerator. NovaUCD has supported over 450 companies, including Ireland’s sixth Unicorn Wayflyer, attract over €1.2b in investment. With Tom’s leadership, NovaUCD has, in the last 5 years, doubled the number of spin-outs and tripled the seed investment in them. He is also Vice President for Special Interest Groups at ASTP and is a frequent presenter at ASTP courses and conferences.
Tom is on the Advisory Boards of two Atlantic Bridge University Venture Funds. He served on the Board of the Dublin Local Enterprise Office and on founding boards of several high-tech companies including DecaWave, acquired for over €360m. He previously set up the first KTO and Innovation Centre at Technical University Dublin and established the Dublin Region Innovation Consortium supporting five institutes with KTO services. He was also seconded to Knowledge Transfer Ireland (KTI) to lead a review of the National IP Protocol.
He began his career as an engineer with several patents, one of which he championed to worldwide deployment and rose through the ranks of corporate America to lead a €100m/year telecommunications consultancy and systems integration business for Nortel as Vice President for Canada and Central US. Tom has an MSc from Aston University and an MBA from Northwestern University in Chicago.