Kent Ono receives 2023 Distinguished Mentor Award

Professor Kent Ono has received the 2023 Distinguished Mentor Award from the University of Utah Graduate School. This year’s awardees demonstrate exceptional commitment to the mentorship of graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and others across campus and beyond. The awardees go above and beyond to foster an inclusive and welcoming community and to instill a culture of outstanding mentorship in their units. Fellow recipients include Katharine Ullman from the Department of Oncological Sciences and Dennis Parker from the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences.

Over the course of his career, Dr. Ono has advised and otherwise mentored countless graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty, and he has done so with incredible dedication and passion. His nominators explained in their application materials that Dr. Ono's mentoring is especially impressive because he lives the ideas he advocates in his scholarship in his role as a mentor. He sees issues of race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, and nation as constitutively linked. He puts theory into practice by tirelessly mentoring students from all walks of life in the academy—making sure there is a place for women, queer people, students with disabilities, undocumented students, immigrants, students of color, and students of low socioeconomic status. In 2023, the very presence and success of so many traditionally underserved and under-recognized individuals in the field of communication is in no small part due to Dr. Ono’s efforts: he has literally changed the face of the discipline of Communication.