Thomas Begley

Thomas Begley is currently a professor emeritus of management in the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. He has demonstrated extensive and sustained leadership in AACSB accreditation since 2010. Over more than a decade of service, he has contributed broadly to AACSB’s accreditation processes, including serving on 40 peer review team visits across all regions, chairing 21 of those visits, and mentoring five schools through the accreditation process.

He has also supported the broader accreditation community as a speaker on accreditation topics at AACSB conferences. His committee service has been both significant and continuous, including roles on the Continuous Improvement Review Committee and the Business Accreditation Policy Committee, as well as two two-year terms on the Initial Accreditation Committee, which he also chaired.

He currently serves as chair of the Eligibility Review Committee, further demonstrating his leadership and ongoing impact on accreditation quality, standards, and policy development. Through these roles, Begley has played a key part in supporting schools globally and strengthening AACSB’s accreditation system.

In addition to serving as dean of the Lally School of Management from 2011 to 2019, Begley held additional senior academic leadership positions, including as dean of the University College Dublin Business School from 2005 to 2011, where he also held the Governor Hugh L. Carey Chair in Organisational Behavior prior to that. Earlier in his career, he served on the faculty of Northeastern University’s College of Business Administration and has held visiting appointments at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, the Prasetiya Mulya Graduate School of Management in Jakarta, Indonesia, Reims Management School in France, and Boston University.

Since returning to the faculty, his scholarly work has focused on how businesses manage ethical issues associated with emerging technologies, and he currently chairs the organizational behavior/human resource management task force for the Management Curriculum for the Digital Era (MaCuDE) project, which addresses the gap between digitalization in business practice and business school curricula.

He holds a bachelor’s degree from Seton Hall University in New Jersey and master’s and PhD degrees from Cornell University in New York. He has been recognized by Irish America magazine as one of the Top 100 Irish Americans and Top 100 Irish Americans in Business.

Additional Information

LinkedIn Profile: Tom Begley