Walter Reed Army Institute of Research

The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research is the largest biomedical research facility administered by the U.S. Department of Defense . The institute is centered at the Forest Glen Annex, part of the unincorporated Silver Spring urban area in Maryland just north of Washington, DC, but it is a subordinate unit of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, headquartered at nearby Fort Detrick, Maryland. At Forest Glen, the WRAIR has shared a laboratory and administrative facility — the Sen Daniel K. Inouye Building, also known as Building 503 — with the Naval Medical Research Center since 1999.The Institute takes its name from Major Walter Reed, MD, the Army physician who, in 1901, led the team that postulated and confirmed the theory that yellow fever is transmitted by a particular mosquito species, rather than by direct contact. Today, the WRAIR fosters and performs biomedical research for the DoD and the US Army. It has recently developed two modern "Centers of Excellence" in the fields of military psychiatry/neuroscience and infectious disease research. The Centers focus, respectively, on soldier fitness, brain injury, and sleep management and in the development of vaccines and drugs for prevention and treatment of such diseases as malaria, HIV/AIDS, dengue fever, wound infections, leishmaniasis, enteric diseases and others.