Managing Workplace Relationships

Brad Blackstone is an award-winning university educator and communication specialist. With 30+ years teaching professional and interpersonal communication, academic and technical writing, and English for academic purposes, Brad has helped countless tertiary students, young educators and corporate employees refine their messaging, whether in preparing documents such as business letters and project reports, pitching themselves and their projects or simply reflecting on growth. Through the years Brad has contributed to dynamic university and corporate training programs in the USA, Portugal, Malaysia, Japan and now in Singapore, including at a number of educational startups, Akita International University (AIU) and Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) among them. He has held teaching appointments at those universities as well as Ohio State University, Minnesota State University in Akita, Japan, and National University of Singapore. He has done training for entities such as General Motors Portugal, the Akita Prefectural Government, Showa Women’s University, Maybank and Linksys. His research interests are in areas as diverse as developing workplace communication competencies, intercultural bridge-building, and the use of social media for pedagogical purposes. He has written grants and participated in projects under the auspices of the Midwestern Universities Consortium for International Affairs, the Japanese Ministry of Education, National University of Singapore, Temasek Foundation, Mapletree Investments and other funding bodies and institutions. With a pair of UNESCO-ACCU grants, Brad led university groups from Japan on research missions in Mongolia and Myanmar. He has also done grant-supported teacher training for institutions across Asia. In his downtime Brad is a music aficionado. He performed blues harp in a band for many years, produced a bi-weekly music programme for Radio Moka, and continues to curate great world music at https://www.mixcloud.com/DaddyPeetExpresso/

Nazerene Ibrahim is an experienced tertiary educator who has won teaching excellence awards in her career spanning two decades. Her teaching journey started during her post-graduate years in Canada and has built up over the years, teaching for the University of Newcastle, Wollongong University, National University of Singapore and the Singapore Institute of Technology.

Nazerene has taught and inspired several young minds in the areas of communication as well as research and writing in the academic and technical domains. She has delivered corporate training to local and overseas participants, focusing on professional communication, interpersonal skills, effective business writing, etc. Her years spent in the Singapore Foreign Service gave her an insight into the significance of effective and impactful communication and the need to forge good relations at the workplace.

Nazerene has a keen interest in research in various aspects of communication and interpersonal behaviour, political communication through social media, and teacher strategies for motivating young and older adult learners. She has a voracious appetite for books of all genres, especially those written about life during the British Raj. She still harbours a dream to pick up the electric guitar, since her mantra is that it’s never too late to learn something new and excel at it.