Engineer Research and Development Center

The Engineer Research and Development Center is a US Army Corps of Engineers laboratory organization whose mission is to "Provide science, technology, and expertise in engineering and environmental sciences in support of our Armed Forces and the Nation to make the world safer and better." The headquarters is located in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on the site of an antecedent organization, the Waterways Experiment Station.HistoryIn October 1999, the Corps of Engineers established a system of laboratories, called the Engineer Research and Development Center . The ERDC was a consolidation of seven, pre-existing laboratories: the Coastal and Hydraulics, Environmental, Geotechnical and Structures, and Information Technology Laboratories in Vicksburg, Mississippi; the Construction Engineering Research Laboratory in Champaign, Illinois; the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, New Hampshire; and the Topographic Engineering Center in Alexandria, Virginia, which became the Army Geospatial Center and started reporting directly to the Corps of Engineers as of 2009. As of 2014, ERDC still maintained a Geospatial Research Laboratory collocated in Alexandria with AGC. ERDC won the Army Research Laboratory of the Year award five times in its first eight years.