PRESS RELEASE
The ATAYAL organization officially welcomes Dr. David Blundell as a member of its Board of Directors
Tainan City, Taiwan - May 31, 2013 - The ATAYAL Organization officially welcomed Professor David Blundell to its board of directors on Friday. David is a published scholar who has attended and lectured at Austronesian events in Taiwan and throughout the world. He currently lives in Taiwan and is an Associate Professor at National Chengchi University in Taipei. The decision to invite him was made not long after founder Tony Coolidge invited Dr. Blundell to participate in the Tap Root Cultural Exchange Program.
"David is one fo the world's foremost experts on the Austronesian connection to Taiwan." stated Mr. Coolidge. "I believe his guidance and expertise can help ATAYAL develop exchange programs and help people understand the Taiwan's Austronesian connection based on science and fact."
As a board member, Blundell will provide advice on Austronesian cultural exchange from an academic perspective for ATAYAL programs. He has worked with groups on temporal spatial digital mapping as an international consortium (www.ecai.org) for an educational database of Pacific languages and cultures. His role at UC Berkeley and Academia Sinica with the GIS Computing Centre has been to physically map 30,000 islands of the Pacific for a digital cultural atlas of languages serving as a bulletin board for scholarly exchange.
The ATAYAL organization was founded in 2001 to provide a window into the indigenous culture of Taiwan for increased international awareness. In June 2012, after traveling to New Zealand, ATAYAL's founder expanded the scope of the mission to establish cooperation between the Austronesian tribes of Taiwan and the Austronesian tribes of the Pacific. The non-profit organization, based in the United States, is actively creating cultural exchange programs between New Zealand and Taiwan and a film project.
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