A Legacy of Global Leadership: 2026 Gala
Dr. Lynn Babington received PAAC's highest honor at this year's gala. The proof of what it means sat two tables away.
There's a particular kind of quiet that falls over a ballroom when someone spends their whole career making other people better, and finally gets recognized for it in front of a few hundred witnesses. That was the moment at PAAC's 72nd Annual Gala — "A Global Affair," held this May at the Kahala Hotel & Resort — when Dr. Lynn Babington, president of Chaminade University of Honolulu, was presented with the Paul S. Bachman Memorial Award, PAAC's highest honor for distinguished contributions to relations between the United States and the Pacific.
The Bachman Award has been given nearly every year since 1957, and the list of past recipients reads like a history of Hawaiʻi's ties to Asia and the Pacific — governors, ambassadors, generals, university presidents. Babington's addition to that list wasn't a surprise to anyone who knows her work. Before taking the helm at Chaminade in 2017, she built a career across nursing, academia, and university leadership — provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Northeastern, dean at Fairfield, a Fulbright Scholar and Robert Wood Johnson Executive Nurse Fellow along the way, with degrees from the University of Washington and the University of Michigan. At Chaminade, a Marianist institution built on a tradition of forming ethical leaders, she's spent nearly a decade pushing to make that mission real — building industry-informed academic programs and hands-on development opportunities that actually prepare students for the world, not just for a diploma.
That word — world — is where Babington's honor and PAAC's mission meet. A few tables away from the podium that night sat Jayden Tran, a Kalani High School senior who PAAC spotlighted as this year's featured student. Jayden's own PAAC journey — a Study Tour to Vietnam that reshaped how he sees his life, three years of leadership through his PAAC Club, an Academic WorldQuest Regional Championship this spring — is, in miniature, exactly the kind of transformation Babington has spent her career trying to build systems for. She develops the leaders. PAAC sends them out into the world before they ever set foot on a college campus. It's not a coincidence that both were being honored in the same room.
It's also not a small thing. This year marks PAAC's 72nd year connecting Hawaiʻi's public high school students to Asia and the Pacific — more than 100,000 students since the organization's founding, currently working with 42 public high schools statewide through Sister-State Study Tours, Academic WorldQuest, the Global Vision Summit, and PAAC Clubs. Honoring someone like Dr. Babington isn't just ceremony. It's PAAC naming, out loud, the kind of leadership it's trying to cultivate in every student who walks through its programs.
"PAAC didn't just broaden his worldview; it pushed him to do something with it."
That line was written about Jayden Tran, but it could just as easily describe what PAAC hopes for every student it sends into the world — and it's why an organization built on getting teenagers on planes chose, this year, to also honor the college president spending her career preparing them for what comes next.
Want to see where PAAC's next 72 years are headed? Follow along, share this story, and consider supporting the programs that turn a Study Tour into a lifetime of leadership.
