The daughter of a bridge engineer in Iowa, Avery Bang spent a lot of her childhood accompanying her father on bridge inspections—"even on holidays," she recalls. Now, Bang builds bridges in developing countries around the world.
Bang's globe-trotting tendencies started in college, where she earned a civil engineering degree from the University of Iowa. A semester abroad in Fiji began the journey that ultimately would take her to the helm of a nonprofit group, Bridges to Prosperity.