Chris Sedgwick is the Americas Trade Specialist at the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity Office of Trade and Investment. He has lived in Chicago for 9 years. Born in Los Angeles, he attended California State University Northridge where he received his Bachelor of Arts in French. As a student, he participated in the Junior Year Abroad program at the University of Aix-en-Provence in France. He later went on to receive his MBA from the Thunderbird Graduate School of Global Management in Glendale, AZ.

After a few years in the freight forwarding and customs brokerage business, Chris went on to a career in international sales for a variety of industrial manufacturing companies in the reinforced plastics, welding, specialty and medical gas, and personal protection equipment industries.