When Joseph Healey P’22, P’24 was trying to figure out how to pay for college, he saw a path that was familiar to his family.
“My grandfather on my mom’s side was a doctor in World War II,” he says. “Two of my uncles had been in the army. The uncle on my mom’s side went to URI on an ROTC scholarship, so I applied and was awarded a four-year Army ROTC scholarship. The difficult part was lining up a biomedical engineering major with a school that also had Army ROTC.”
Boston University offered admission to ROTC students and had a biomedical engineering major that, Healey says, “crammed together pre-med coursework with engineering, two of the most difficult majors that exist.” He managed to maintain his GPA at BU while also working as a Resident Assistant to cover room and board.
Asked how he became interested in biomedical engineering, he says, “It may sound trite, but I just thought it sounded cool, like The Six Million Dollar Man. I really liked biology, and I was good at science and math.”
Upon graduation, he entered active military duty. He went for training at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and completed the Officer Basic Course at Fort Sam Houston in Texas. He was assigned to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he served as a first lieutenant from 1988 to 1992.
“The Department of Defense was just getting into DNA sequencing to assemble blood samples for every person that came into the military,” he says. “They wanted to make sure casualties could be identified and there would never be another unknown soldier. I saw lots of injured patients during the Gulf War. I saw what it was like to serve in combat. Thank God there weren’t many casualties.”
Paying it Forward
Having experienced firsthand how financial aid and military service can redefine a person’s life trajectory, Healey has committed substantial resources to expand educational access for U.S. military veterans and non-traditional students at Brown. That commitment stems from a deep sense of gratitude and a desire to return an investment that Brown made in his mother.
Tonia Healey ’80, GP’22, GP’24 attended Brown as a non-traditional student through the Resumed Undergraduate Education (RUE) program. Her RUE scholarship afforded her a transformative Ivy League education after a career as a registered nurse. “My mom came out of a really difficult situation, and Brown gave her a shot,” he says. “I’ll always remember that generosity.” Tonia Healey designed her own concentration in literature and psychology, poetry as a therapeutic process, and she went on to become Rhode Island’s first certified poetry therapist.
Healey describes his $20 million gift to Brown in 2020 as an opportunity to return a double investment—one the University made in his mother and one the U.S. military made in him.
