Brad Myles serves as Executive Director and CEO of Polaris, a global leader in the fight to eradicate human trafficking and to restore freedom to survivors. For over a decade, he has devoted himself to combating human trafficking and modern slavery on a local, national, and global scale. Myles’ early efforts focused on directly serving survivors, researching local human trafficking markets, and helping to build Washington DC’s first-ever Human Trafficking Task Force.

Although slavery is commonly thought to be a thing of the past, human traffickers generate hundreds of billions of dollars in profits by trapping millions of people in horrific situations around the world, including here in the U.S. Traffickers use violence, threats, deception, debt bondage, and other manipulative tactics to force people to engage in commercial sex or to provide labor or services against their will. Under the leadership of Brad Myles, Polaris has also worked to strengthen the U.S. national movement against human trafficking through policy advocacy in all 50 states, and through a wide range of training and capacity-building programs. Myles has also helped create and launch Polaris’s operation of the United States national human trafficking hotline at 1-888-373-7888, which has identified and responded to more than 25,000 cases of human trafficking nationwide. This national model is now regarded as one of the bestfunctioning anti- trafficking hotlines in the world and has become a focal point of Polaris’ growing global programs.

Myles is currently focusing his efforts on Polaris’ future strategy for the next decade, which includes working towards better anti-trafficking hotline coverage globally to build a stronger safety net for all 21 million victims of human trafficking worldwide, strengthening partnerships with the world’s leading technology companies, and undertaking new data-driven intervention efforts targeted towards eliminating specific types of modern slavery in the U.S. and around the world. He holds degrees in psychology and political science from Stanford University.