2020 40 Under 40 Yearbook: Brad Bodenhausen, 52

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Then: Senior Vice President of Public Affairs/Communications, Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce
Now: Associate Vice President of International Education and Training, Missouri State University

Since making the jump to Missouri State University from the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce in 2013, Brad Bodenhausen and his team have developed some 60 programs for the international education and training department he helped create. The bulk of the programs are customized education, he says, with the goal of building cultural competencies.

It’s a goal he’s long been passionate about. And he can trace its origins to a monthlong stay in northern Sweden in 1997 through Rotary.

“In such a time of really trending toward isolation and exclusion and withdrawal from international communities,” he says, “we feel like that the world is so connected and so interdependent that we really need to focus on those connections and communities.”