A third-year graduate student, Dong Ok Kim has been a mentor for the past two years to Michelle Zorigt and Martha Kubakh, two undergraduate researchers in the electrochemistry lab of professor Joaquín Rodríguez-López, who described Kim as an outstanding mentor and female role model.
He said Kim’s guidance as a mentor had a transformative influence on the interests and development of Zorigt and Kubakh, who are both attending graduate school this fall to pursue research in the area of electrochemistry.
Kim is the recipient of the 2025 Dr. Sandra Murawski Award for Mentoring Excellence in the Department of Chemistry. The Murawski award in the amount of $1,000 was established by alumna Dr. Sandra Murawski (PhD, ’86, Rinehart) who built a 40-year career in chemistry at P&G and established the award to recognize and support excellence in graduate student mentoring.
Kim is an international student from South Korea, who attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, had to return to South Korea and continued her education and research at Seoul National University where she was fortunate to have met her mentor who guided her through her first co-first author paper.
Now a mentor herself, Kim said she enjoy mentoring and loves having productive scientific discussions with others, especially discussing the experimental results, and constructing a hypothesis together.
“Having mentees added layers to my PhD life. I have better understandings of my own project as I explain it to them and being a mentor makes me become more persistent and patient in conducting experiments,” said Kim, who aspires to continue research in industry. “I am eager to keep contributing to the development of energy storage systems.”
From the beginning, Rodríguez-López said, Kim ensured that Zorigt and Kubakh felt their contributions were meaningful and impactful, posing research questions they could tackle through clearly defined experiments and allowing them to take ownership of the entire research process, fostering a strong sense of confidence and independence in her mentees. He said Kim guided them to think critically and maintained an open and collaborative environment, where they felt comfortable suggesting new ideas and planning next steps, and Kim supported them in refining hypotheses, improving experimental design, and navigating the emotional ups and downs of research.
Zorigt was a co-author on a recent publication in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A detailing research on the detection of manganese and molecular oxygen from decomposing battery materials, and Kubakh is expected to be a co-author on a future paper.
Zorigt will attend graduate school at the University of Oregon, and Kubakh will attend graduate school at UC Berkeley. Kim was actively involved in their graduate school application journeys, reviewing personal statements, offering feedback, and sharing her own experiences.
Zorigt said she has grown incredibly as both a researcher and student with Kim as her mentor.
“Dong Ok has been an amazing, and supportive mentor,” Zorigt said. “She always makes sure that you fully understand why a certain approach is being taken and provides the literature and resources to back it up. Her approachable and kind demeanor created an environment where I felt comfortable to ask questions and learn from my mistakes. With her advanced mastery of electrochemistry and exciting research, Dong Ok has been the best mentor a student could hope for."
Kubakh said Kim was an amazing mentor because she gave her the tools and skills necessary to grow into a confident, independent researcher.
“She provided me with a solid foundation in the fundamentals which allowed me to design and carry out my own experiments,” Kubakh said. “She was also always willing to help me troubleshoot and was extremely responsive to my questions, no matter the time of day. Above all, she genuinely cared about her mentees and was deeply invested in our development and success.”