VIP Profile: Brad Halsey

BUILDING MOMENTUM

STORY BY LIESEL SCHMIDT

Problem-solving is where Brad Halsey excels. Disasters, conflict, inequality; all of these are areas that require critical thinking to solve or put an end to. This is precisely Halsey’s niche. Putting his love for learning and teaching technology together with his desire to serve, he created Building Momentum, an organization whose mission is to “solve difficult problems, teach people to resolve issues and provide a space where these activities can occur."

"I’m at my best when I’m helping people at their worst,” says Halsey, who spent a year in Iraq in 2008 solving problems for the military as a scientist and became hooked on solution development.

"I’m at my best when I’m helping people at their worst."

In his personal life, Halsey is a proud husband and father and loves creating music. “I was a music major at Vanderbilt before changing to chemistry and can play an obnoxiously long guitar solo,” he says with a smile. Reflective of his love for guitar is his penchant for “Always with Me, Always with You” by Joe Satriani. “It crescendos into guitar virtuosity by one of the greatest guitarists of all time,” he says. “I aspire to write a song that reflects passion like this piece.” On the more physical side of things, he’s also a boxing enthusiast and is “stupidly decent” at foosball.

Halsey’s path to Alexandria has been anything but linear. During his time at Vanderbilt, he joined ROTC and then went on to the Navy. Poor surgical results to repair combat wounds to his shoulder left him disabled, so Halsey determined that his next career would be more cerebral than physical. He went to Silicon Valley and worked at a think tank, though his work there left him frustrated. “We weren’t helping people quickly enough, so I went to Iraq to develop solutions at the pointof-need,” he says. He then became a consultant and moved to Alexandria to be closer to the DOD. Clearly, Halsey has embraced an ethos espoused by the words of Helen Keller that so inspire him: “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.”