UH Hilo sociologist Lindy Hern reflects on her tenure as president of the national Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology
From the get-go at AACS almost two decades ago, Associate Professor of Sociology Lindy Hern found a community that respected her perspective as a student and valued her participation as she advanced her career and became a faculty member.
By Susan Enright/UH Hilo Stories.
It’s an inspiring story of a graduate student, almost 20 years ago at the University of Missouri, who found a community of national scholars who respected and encouraged her perspective and work.
Lindy Hern, an associate professor of sociology and chair of the department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, has just completed her tenure as president of the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology. She’s slowly worked her way up through the ranks of the organization from committee member to leadership. The presidential role comes in three stages, a year each: president elect, president, and immediate past president.
Her year as president was just capped with a successful national AACS conference, with a personal highlight of immense pride when several UH Hilo sociology students came away with an award for their stellar work in a tough competitive exercise.
Hern’s path from graduate student to president of the prestigious national organization dedicated to her field was one of steady determination inspired by mentors and colleagues.
“I became involved as a graduate student at the University of Missouri,” says Hern. “At the time, my department was really focused on academic sociology rather than applied sociology, so no one was really involved in AACS.”
But Hern had kept in touch with her undergraduate advisor who in 2009 became the president of AACS. “He encouraged me to present a paper at my first AACS conference in 2009,” she says.
In AACS, Hern says she found a community that valued the application of sociological knowledge and research to real world settings more than other professional organizations she was involved in at the time; most were more likely to focus on research for the sake of research and publication. But at AACS, she found a community that respected her perspective as a student and valued her participation as she advanced her career and became a faculty member.
Hern has only missed one conference since 2009, and she was encouraged to start taking on leadership roles in the organization from the get-go. She started with helping on committees. “I was on the local arrangements committee the last time we had the conference in St. Louis over ten years ago.”
Once she finished her doctoral program and became a full time faculty member, she started getting strong encouragement from AACS leadership to run for the board; she became a board member in 2015. She then moved on up the ladder to vice president in 2019, where she was tasked with organizing the last face-to-face conference before COVID shut things down for a few years.
Emerging from the COVID shutdowns, Hern was encouraged to run for president, becoming president-elect in October of 2023, president in October of 2024, and is now immediate past president until October of 2026. All three roles come with assigned tasks and responsibilities.
“One of the primary goals was to help the organization get to a more financially stable place post COVID,” Hern says. “I encouraged the board to support a move to alternating between online and face-to-face conferences every other year. So, we had an online conference again in 2024 which was financially successful enough for us to plan a face-to-face conference for October 2025.”
In addition to implementing some procedural systems that will last beyond her term and help the organization run more efficiently going forward, Hern also worked with the board to create more ways to engage membership throughout the year, including “coffee chats” on zoom that are open to members and people interested in becoming members.
“For these we have a guest speaker who will talk about their work for a bit and then engage attendees in a chat about the subject,” she explains. “These have been pretty successful and I’ll be taking charge of organizing these this year as an additional task in the role of immediate past president.”
2025 Conference of the Association of Applied and Clinical Sociology
A top priority of Hern’s work as president was to organize AACS’s annual conference for 2025.
“We started planning the conference in 2023 when I announced the theme at our board meeting in Tampa,” she explains. “I decided on the theme, ‘Scholar-Activism: All Around us and Within,’ because my location as an applied sociologist is really in the realm of scholar-activism. I’ve published on this topic and have been asked to guest edit a special issue of the Journal of Applied Social Science on this topic.”
In addition to developing the theme, she brought the conference back to her home state of Missouri.
“I didn’t know what the context would be like in the fall of 2025,” she says. “The political and economic context of this current time, fall of 2025, definitely affected the experience and outcome of the conference.” A hybrid option was created so international members who were afraid to travel to the United States could still participate online.
These workarounds made the organization of the conference more complicated but was valued by everyone who had the chance to participate either as an in-person presenter or online attendee.
“I had specific invited speakers and workshop hosts in mind given the theme of the conference and for the most part we were able to facilitate the participation of all of them, which was much appreciated by all conference attendees,” she says.
- See Lindy Hern’s address at the 2025 AACS Annual Meeting.
“We also had great student participation, which is really important to me and to the organization,” says Hern.
Two student teams from UH Hilo participated in the Client Problem Competition, and Hern is very excited to report that one of the teams took home third place. “A great achievement especially considering that they were competing against face-to-face teams from around the country,” says Hern.
“So, all in all, I’d say the conference was a success.”
Hern says that after completing her current year as immediate past president, she will probably take some time off away from leadership in the organization.
“I’ll just be able to enjoy participating in other ways,” she says. “There is some discussion of the possibility of bringing the AACS conference to Hilo in the future, we shall see.”
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Story by Susan Enright, public information specialist for the Office of the Chancellor and editor of UH Hilo Stories. She received her bachelor of arts in English and certificate in women’s studies from UH Hilo.
