The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) has announced University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa School of Architecture associate professor Cathi Ho Schar as its incoming president for 2024–2025.

Ho Schar is also the inaugural director of the eight-year-old University of Hawaiʻi Community Design Center (UHCDC), where she has gained valuable experience working with legislators, state agency directors, and faculty principal investigators to establish partnerships with over 30 public and non-profit organizations while generating $8 million in community-engaged research.

Those efforts were instrumental in helping the UHCDC win the 2020 AIA/ACSA Practice and Leadership Award. Ho Schar says: "As an island-based educator and practitioner, I am shaped by Hawaiʻi’s Indigenous, immigrant, and multicultural community and aligned with ACSA’s commitments to equity and inclusion."

In her new role as president, Ho Schar has identified three agenda items as priorities for the organization in alignment with ACSA’s three-year Strategic Plan:

1. Continuing to connect the continuum of architectural education, including community colleges, four-year programs, and accredited degree programs, through licensure, to advocate for the role and value of higher education across these different paths; 
2. Furthering research and discourse on climate action and social justice through the Academy for Public Scholarship on the Built Environment and resources to assist with identifying funding and building relationships with collaborators, grantors, and other sponsoring agencies;
3. Exploring mental health and wellbeing for students and faculty, across all position types, in consideration of equity issues, workloads, and burn-out.  

Cathi Ho Schar is also a co-founding principal of the Honolulu-based practice Collaborative Studio LLC. Her resume includes a 2020 ACSA Collaborative Practice Award, the 2021 ACSA Course Development Prize, an ACSA New Faculty Teaching Award, and an induction into the AIA College of Fellows from the same year. 

She follows current ACSA president Mo Zell.