Hilary Smith has an applied linguistics in education background, with over 30 years of teaching and researching in New Zealand and Australia, the South Pacific, and Southeast Asia. She has lived in Tonga, Papua Guinea, and Lao PDR, and has also worked in Indonesia, Kiribati, Vanuatu, and Solomon Islands, Nepal, Thailand, and Timor-Leste. Hilary's academic focus is on language-in-education, innovative methods for measuring attitudes, language policy, and the implementation of language revival. Since 2016 she has been supporting the language revival of the Gamilaraay language in New South Wales. Hilary also has a particular interest in organisational development and leadership of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and monitoring and development (M&E) for NGOs. She has had a long involvement with New Zealand's international volunteer sending organisation VSA (Te Tuao Tawahi Volunteer Service Abroad), including serving as national Chair for nine years, and is one of six life members. She is a past president of  TESOLANZ (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages), and is the current President of ALANZ (Applied Linguistics in Aotearoa New Zealand - Ko te ropu rapu reo o Aotearoa: Kua ki te kete, he nui nga hua) and co-convenes the Languages Alliance Aotearoa NZ.

DipTESL, MA (Applied Linguistics), PhD (Linguistics) Victoria University of Wellington, NZ