Duk Hee Lee Murabayashi, a community associate member of the University of Hawai'i Center for Korean Studies, received the Order of Civil Merit Moran Medal (국민훈장 모란장) from Republic of Korea president Moon Jae-in in a Korean Day ceremony in Seoul on October 5, 2019.
Murabayashi, who is president of the Korean Immigration Research Institute in Hawai'i, was an urban planner working in private consulting and research and for state and city governments in Hawai‘i for more than thirty years. She earned master’s degrees in sociology from UC Berkeley and in urban and regional planning from the University of Southern California.
Since retiring, she has devoted full time to researching Korean immigration history. Her publications, in Korean, include One Hundred Years of Korean Immigration in Hawai‘i (2003), History of Korean Christian Church, Korean Christian Institute and Dongji Hoi (2008), Korean Experience Chronology in the United States (2010), A Centennial History of the Korean National Association (2013), and Syngman Rhee’s Thirty Years in Hawai‘i (2015).
Murabayashi has published numerous papers in both English and Korean on Korean immigrant history in Hawai‘i. She is in frequent demand by Korean and local television documentary makers and as a research consultant. She has been instrumental in building the Center's collection of primary sources on the history of Koreans in the Islands.
A video clip of the presentation ceremony is available at https://www.facebook.com/ckshawaii/videos/703523263445811/.