Awards
- Herman Frederic Lieber Award - 2010
Kern joined the IU South Bend faculty in 1995, after having taught at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana University Bloomington and the University of Virginia. She has served on the editorial review boards of the Journal of the American Taxation Association and Advances in Taxation.
She frequently has been recognized for her teaching by both her peers and leaders in the accounting profession. In 2008, she was honored as a "master teacher" by the American Accounting Association at its first Annual Conference on Teaching and Learning. She has been awarded the IU South Bend School of Business and Economics Teaching Excellence Award each year since 1999, and is a three-time winner of the IU Trustees' Teaching Excellence Award.
In 2000, she was inducted into IU's Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching (FACET), and has often impressed her peers in the humanities.
Additional IU recognition of Kern's teaching came with her selection as a charter member and IU South Bend's representative to the Mack Center for Inquiry and Learning. In this role, she helped to draft the founding vision and organizational statement for the center, which has become the primary institute for the scholarship of teaching and learning at IU statewide.
In addition to her students at IU South Bend, Kern has taken an active role in improving educational requirements for all those studying accounting across the country. She has served as president, vice president, and trustee of the American Taxation Association (ATA), and also served on the Education Executive Committee of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). She was a member of a joint ATA/AICPA task force that revised the model tax curriculum for undergraduate education.