photo by: David Beard

U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., right, tours Leidos’ Morgantown software center.

MORGANTOWN — U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., came to town Wednesday afternoon and took a tour of the Leidos software center.

Leidos is a software developer that contracts with federal agencies such as the FBI, Department of Energy and Department of War. It employs more than 300 people.

A presence in north-central West Virginia for 30 years, its 30,000-square-foot Morgantown software center sits atop a hill above Morgantown Mall and University Town Centre. Leidos also operates in Clarksburg and Bridgeport, and at the National Energy Technology Laboratory.

A common theme for the day was that a West Virginia company staffed with West Virginians is having a global impact.

“It’s really neat to think that all this worldwide technology, it’s right out of here,” Capito said. “It’s run out of here with a lot of West Virginia talent.”

She noted that Leidos has cooperative arrangements with Fairmont State and WVU, and has a cybersecurity classroom at WVU. Leidos brings in interns, trains and hires them.

Ben Young, Leidos site program manager, pointed out how the center is designed, with a collaborative floor plan that allows cross-team work and seats senior staff next to interns, “and growing a culture around that.”

Many of the employees are West Virginians who want to stay home, she said. “They want to be part of the new economy, the next economy, a job where you know the future is there, and it’s exciting to them. Anywhere you go in the world, there’s a footprint of something a West Virginian has done. That’s a tribute to Leidos and the educational institutions they work with.”

Several Leidos leaders described some of the company’s contracts and what it provides for the federal government.

For instance, NGI is a biometric identification program used by the FBI in cooperation with federal, state and tribal authorities. Leidos’ work has slashed the time it takes to get a match from weeks — under the old hard-copy snail-mail system of decades ago — to hours and now to seconds.

It can not only identify criminals, but it can help prevent crime through such things as background checks on potential adoptive parents, Capito learned.

ProSight is a software platform that integrates security screening equipment, threat detection algorithms and third-party data for security at airports and other organizations with critical security needs.

David Jones is program manager for DOW ABIS — an automated biometric identification system for the Department of War. It serves the intelligence community, Border Patrol and various agencies. It provides identity intelligence and allows agencies to take action against potential threats, and it reaches across the globe.

Jones said he grew up in Ravenswood, went to college out of state but came back to work at Leidos.

“It’s fantastic to be able to have a meaningful and rewarding career in IT, in software engineering, in cybersecurity, here where it’s home,” he said. And the work spans the globe. “It’s all happening here: the developers, the testers, the analysts for this system that is generating all that is being done here in West Virginia, and that’s amazing when you think about it.”