Danielle Rocheleau Salaz
- Executive Director, Center for Asian Studies
- CENTER FOR ASIAN STUDIES
Education
M.A., Japanese Language and Civilizations, University of Colorado Boulder, 2000
B.A., Japan Studies, Teikyo Loretto Heights University Campus of the University of Colorado Denver, 1996
Regional and Thematic Interests
East Asia
Language
Profile
Danielle Rocheleau Salaz (M.A., Japanese Language and Civilization, University of Colorado Boulder; B.A., Japan Studies, Teikyo Loretto Heights University at the University of Colorado Denver) has been with the Center for Asian Studies (CAS) at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU) since 2005 and has served as the Center’s Executive Director since 2014. In 1998-99, she completed an intensive one-year course at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama, Japan, a program sponsored by an American university consortium and administered by Stanford. Then she worked at the Consulate General of Japan in Denver for six years.
As Executive Director of CAS, Salaz has guided the Center’s strategic planning, managed day-to-day operations, and administered over $10 million in grant and charitable funding in support of the Center’s mission of expanding access to information about Asia both on and off campus. Salaz built and launched the summer Asia Internship Program for CU students in Japan in 2016, expanding into China in 2019. She is currently seeking interested organizations in Southeast Asia to host interns.
Salaz’s recent contributions to the field of Asian Studies include speaking on a 2024 Association for Asian Studies Conference roundtable, “Looking to the Future: Community Engagement and Capacity Building in Asian Studies,” convened by the U.S. Department of Education’s International and Foreign Language Education Office, and authoring an invited chapter in an edited volume, Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum in Higher Education: Harnessing the Transformative Potentials of CLAC Across Disciplines (2022).
Salaz was selected for the Employee of the Year Award for 2022-23. As a recognized a leader at CU Boulder, she serves on college- and campus-wide committees as a representative of CAS and provides formal and informal mentorship and partnership to faculty and staff members. She was elected Chair of the national Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum Consortium in fall 2024.