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solutions

2016

U.S. Army Edgewood Chemical Biological Center

Year in Review

Approved for Public Release

U.S. Army Edgewood Chemical Biological Centeri

directormessage from the

2016 Year in Review ii

Welcome to Solutions—Edgewood Chemical Biological Center’s year in review for 2016. I’m excited

to share with you our progress in meeting the challenges of protecting our warfighters and our nation

from chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction in an increasingly complex world.

The challenges associated with our task have expanded rapidly in recent years as the global defense

picture has shifted. The rise of non-state actors on the world stage has eroded the progress that had

been made possible by the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Biological Weapons Convention.

Even as these international treaties have led to the elimination of chemical weapons stockpiles

by many state parties and the prevention of the development of biological weapons programs by

signatory nations, the threat of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction in the hands of

non-signatory nations and non-state actors remains a major cause for concern.

We must also contend with the potential for the regional or global outbreak of a deadly disease

initiated by a deliberate biological attack on a local populace, which could potentially spread to the

point that it would strain the capabilities of the United States and its allies as the disease is transmitted

from person to person through global travel networks.

In addition, we face the challenge of responding to the threats of today while preparing to counter the

threats of tomorrow. Advances in synthetic biology and genetic engineering present potential dangers

in the hands of our nation’s enemies.

To provide a tactical and operational framework for meeting the challenges before us, Edgewood

Chemical Biological Center has adopted five strategic goals. We will grow and support our

workforce in order to maintain a diverse community of world-class talent to meet the challenges of a

rapidly changing world; sustain and modernize our infrastructure to ensure that we have the most

advanced equipment and facilities available; cultivate innovation within our workforce to explore

new, cutting-edge ideas for dealing with emerging chemical and biological threats; collaborate and

communicate across the entire chemical biological defense enterprise to create and leverage good

ideas to benefit our nation; and deliver quality products and services so that our organizational

excellence enables our customers’ success.

This issue of Solutions examines the past year’s progress in our work toward each of these five

strategic goals in order to provide a snapshot of what we’ve accomplished and what still lies before

us. We’re sharing this because we are united with you, our stakeholders, in our desire to ensure that

our warfighters are prepared to deal with the chemical and biological threats on the modern battlefield

and that we are prepared to protect our citizens and our way of life.

We will continue to build upon the past year’s success in achieving our strategic goals, and we’ll

continue to work together with our stakeholders and partners in government, industry, and academia

to overcome the challenges of protecting our warfighters and our nation from chemical and biological

weapons of mass destruction.

Joseph L. Corriveau, Ph.D. ECBC Director

i Message from the Director

1 Grow and Support the Workforce

7 Sustain and Modernize Infrastructure

11 Cultivate Innovation

17 Collaborate and Communicate

25 Deliver Quality Products and Services

33 Director’s Perspective

contentstable of

Grow and Support the Workforce

Strategic Goal

Two of the Army’s 2016 Science and Engineering Apprenticeship Program participants tour ECBC’s proteomics laboratory

objectives• Embrace the strengths of diverse

people in an inclusive environment.

• Build and retain a professional workforce with the knowledge, capabilities, skills and experience required to support customer needs now and in the future.

• Provide ongoing leadership, education and training opportunities for the entire workforce.

U.S. Army Edgewood Chemical Biological Center2

A trained and ready workforce is a top priority for the success of ECBC’s national security mission. ECBC will enhance its human capital planning processes with the goal of recruiting, challenging, and retaining a diverse community of world class employees.

In 2016, ECBC embraced the strengths of diverse people in an inclusive environment through its Minority Undergraduate Student Internship Program (MUSIP), its Minority-serving Institution STEM Research and Development Consortium, and its Sexual Harassment Assault Response and Prevention (SHARP) Program Training efforts.

ECBC continued building and retaining its workforce through its ongoing Leadership Cohort Program and through its STEM outreach to area schools. Also, to meet customer requirements now and in the future, ECBC hired 119 employees in 2016, which was a 45 percent increase over 2015’s hiring total, and raised ECBC’s roster to 1,437. Thirty-five of these came from a realignment of personnel from the West Desert Test Center at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, which adds a one-of-a-kind biological testing expertise to the center. In addition, ECBC has 34 employees located at its satellite site at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and another 80 at the Rock Island Arsenal in Rock Island, Illinois.

Finally, ECBC provided ongoing leadership, education and training opportunities to the workforce through its Executive Officer Internship Program, and promoted command-wide and Army-wide developmental opportunities through its two new workforce newsletters.

“When I started my career with the Army, our laboratory had a very different culture than it does today,” said George Collins, director of the Office of Safety and Human Capital, and the champion for the Grow and Support the Workforce strategic goal. “Looking back, I am astonished how much progress we have made. Today, ECBC employees have access to more information, take advantage of higher education and developmental programs, and in general take more responsibility for their careers than previous generations. I believe that a key element in this transformation has been leadership's engagement with the workforce from the bench level up, combined with the willingness of individuals to step up and be active participants in the many workforce development processes that we have established. Going forward, we will continuously find ways of making ECBC the best place in the country to work.”

2016 Year in Review 3

laboratories and the importance of chemical biological defense research.

The research projects the interns participated in were also highly varied. They ranged from spore adhesion on surfaces to using hydrogel as a sampling material to using synthesized molecules known as metal organic frameworks to remove chlorine from liquids. What they all had in common was a seriousness of effort that made their mentors proud and impressed ECBC leadership.

ECBC Invests in a Diverse Future Workforce

In an effort to increase the number of minority students pursuing a science, technology, engineering or math education and then employment at government defense laboratories, ECBC began working with the United Negro College Fund Special Programs Corporation more than four years ago. Together they established the Minority-serving Institution STEM Research and Development Consortium.

Minority Interns Get a Taste of World Class Chemical Biological Research

For the eighth year, ECBC hosted a class of minority interns to participate in ten weeks of chemical biological research under the mentorship of ECBC subject matter experts. Known as the Minority Undergraduate Student Internship Program, or MUSIP, the program concludes with the interns presenting their research findings to ECBC leadership.

The 2016 class of interns came from as far away as the University of Washington and St. Frances College of New York. Others were from as close as the University of Maryland College Park and Towson University. Their STEM majors also varied greatly and included biology, geology, bioengineering, chemical engineering, and aerospace engineering. After working as Department of the Army civilians for the ten weeks, the interns return to their schools with a better appreciation of the role of government

ECBC's 2016 class of MUSIP interns learns about the Field Deployable Hydrolysis System that ECBC designed, built, and operated to safely destroy Syria’s declared chemical agent stockpile at sea.


The initiative has attracted membership from more than 40 minority-serving institutions across the country, including schools historically serving blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and Alaskan natives. It includes institutions as well-known as Howard University, Morehouse College, and Tuskegee University.

For the second year of this program, students and faculty at these institutions submitted research proposals to ECBC, where subject matter experts evaluated them competitively. A committee of ECBC scientists awarded research grants to the most promising proposals. They also provided mentorship to the winning students over the course of their one-year research projects. In 2016, ECBC awarded five grants ranging from $80,000 to $280,000. ECBC expects to fund even more research projects next year.

The Consortium’s long-term goals are two-fold. The first is to increase and diversify the human talent engaged in improving national security through advanced chemical and biological defense research. Second is to assist minority-serving institutions in developing and expanding an infrastructure of STEM faculty and laboratories.

ECBC Enhances SHARP Training Efforts

ECBC managers and employees worked together in enhancing the Center’s Sexual Harassment Assault Response and Prevention (SHARP) Program. The result was achieving 99 percent training completion rate for of workforce by offering 27 classes given by internal SHARP qualified instructors. In addition, ECBC was a major contributor to U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command and Aberdeen Proving Ground installation SHARP events such as the SHARP Expo, SHARP Summit, and Sexual Assault Review Board.

STEM Outreach Primes Young Students for Potential Careers

One of ECBC’s strategic goals is to grow and support the future workforce. Part of that challenge is investing in the next generation of STEM students, some of whom will ultimately come to ECBC to become research scientists and engineers in chemical biological defense.

ECBC enhances this process by visiting area public schools to introduce science, technology, engineering and math to students ranging from pre-kindergarten to seniors in high school. ECBC volunteers do this in ways that provide hands-on learning and engage the students’ imaginations while relating to real-world applications.

In 2016, ECBC sent its scientists and engineers to more than 200 classrooms, reaching almost 6,000 students. Lessons have ranged from building marshmallow catapults for younger students to creating chemical reactions in the classroom for older students. Many of the students who experienced this outreach have later participated in the STEM summer internship program at ECBC.

Developmental Program Helps Groom Employees for Leadership Roles

In 2016, ECBC revived its Executive Officer Developmental Assignments Program. The program gives high-performing employees at the GS-12 through GS-14 levels an opportunity to serve as an executive officer in one of ECBC’s three directorates for six months. They are selected through a competitive process that includes submitting a resume and being interviewed by the director they are vying to be assigned to.

Those selected receive a holistic view of ECBC through their assignments and participate in planning and business development throughout ECBC, and cooperative efforts with CBRNE partner organizations. They also perform a wide variety of tasks far removed from their original science or engineering discipline, such as serving as a liaison with other directorates, implementing ECBC’s strategic plan, and organizing center-wide events.

“I worked at ECBC for 15 years before being selected to serve as the executive officer for the Directorate of Program Integration,” said Jennifer Exelby, Chemical Operations Branch chief for the Chemical Biological Applications and Risk Reduction Business Unit. “It’s been eye-opening to get out of my branch and see all the different things other groups are working on. The experience has reinforced my sense of purpose in working at ECBC.”An ECBC STEM outreach specialist engages kindergartners at a

local school in the fun side of scientific research.


Students at the Bel Air High School biomedicine summer camp in Bel Air, Md., perform DNA extractions under the guidance of an ECBC scientist.

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In a related but separate development program, ECBC also continued to develop promising young leaders as executive officers to the ECBC director. For this developmental assignment, individuals spend six months as executive officer to the ECBC director and six months in the Office of the Army Deputy Chief of Staff, G8, in the Pentagon. Spending time supporting the Army G8 in the Pentagon provides the aspiring leaders with valuable experience related to the Army’s role as the executive agent for the Chemical Biological Defense Program.

Executive Officer Internship Program participants form a cadre of natural leaders possessing a global view of the organization, making them the farm team for future senior leadership.

ECBC Trains a New Generation of Emerging Leaders

ECBC’s latest Leadership Cohort Program for 2016 included 15 employees hailing from all three ECBC directorates and possessing diverse subject matter expertise. Each was endorsed by his or her supervisor

to take part and grow professionally. Their skills ranged from chemical engineering and molecular biology to acquisition and finance.

The program began in the early 1990s and is designed to build leadership skills and encourage networking across the center. It includes six training sessions that run from February to the end of March. The training sessions cover personal productivity, valuing contributions from others, working across organizational boundaries, learning beyond the classroom, learning to lead as a lifelong endeavor, and how to use feedback from colleagues and supervisors. The participants divide into teams and develop projects that solve practical problems using their new skills.

One participant, Beverly Ozman, an ECBC human resources specialist, said, “I started applying the course lessons before the course was even over, and it started to improve the way I did my job immediately.”

ECBC Director Joseph Corriveau, Ph.D. addresses members of the ECBC Cohort program,which is designed to build leadership skills and encourage networking across the center.

Sustain and Modernize Infrastructure

Strategic Goal

ECBC regularly upgrades its facilities inventory to provide researchers with the best chemical biological research facilities in the world, such as the Non-Traditional Agent Defense Test System.

objectives• Maintain and modernize

facilities and equipment.

• Remove obsolete facilities.

• Optimize processes to acquire, upgrade or divest capabilities to meet ever-changing customer needs in a timely manner.


Modern facilities and specialized equipment are necessary to enable members of our workforce to perform their jobs. Through an infrastructure planning process, ECBC leadership ensures that the workforce has the required world-class facilities and equipment to safely and successfully perform their mission.

In 2016, ECBC addressed facilities and equipment maintenance and modernization by standing up the Sustain and Modernize Infrastructure Team to focus on strategic initiatives and by working to establish a committe that will implement tactical infrastructure plans for major renovations, modernizations, and demolition. ECBC also provided leadership to Aberdeen Proving Ground’s Aesthetics Integrated Project Team which will result in ongoing beautification of the Edgewood campus.

ECBC continues to execute its plan to remove several obsolete buildings and contaminated infrastructure in cooperation with Aberdeen Proving Ground Directorate of Public Works.

ECBC optimized processes to acquire, upgrade or divest capabilities to meet ever-changing customer needs in a timely manner by standardizing and streamlining the center’s equipment maintenance contracts.

“Keeping up with the modernization needs of a scientific research organization as large and diverse as ECBC is a constant challenge,” said William Klein, deputy director of engineering, and the Sustain and Modernize Infrastructure strategic goal champion. “But it is a challenge that stimulates us to be creative in the way we keep technologically ahead, and in the way we make ECBC’s campus a place where the best scientists and engineers in the world want to work.”

As older buildings in far flung locations in the vast acreage of ECBC’s host, Aberdeen Proving Ground, are demolished and new buildings constructed, Klein and his infrastructure planning team are working to create a campus feel. “Ultimately, I’d like to direct our demolition and building decision making toward the goal of turning the Edgewood portion of ECBC into a walking campus,” said Klein.


ECBC Develops Process for Infrastructure Planning

In decades past, ECBC had a centralized decision-making process about what to build and where to build it. Over time, those decisions became the province of individual directorates, with the directorates sometimes competing with each other for scarce military construction funding.

In 2016, ECBC’s Sustain and Modernize Infrastructure Team staffed and initiated the re-chartering of the Facilities Steering Committee. It will meet regularly as an advisory body to ECBC senior leadership on the planning and execution of center-wide projects.

ECBC leadership has established three infrastructure funding priorities - new construction of both an Emerging Threat Center and a Chemical Biological Innovation, Collaboration, and Alliance Center, to be funded through the Military Construction Program. The third project is restoration and modernization of ECBC’s World War II-era industrial art deco buildings, E-3330 and E-3331, along with E-3332.

Partnership with APG Improves ECBC Campus

At 100 years old and with more than 73,000 acres on the Chesapeake Bay, Aberdeen Proving Ground has many aesthetic qualities that its leadership takes seriously — so much so that in 2016 the installation formed an Aesthetics Integrated Project Team, which ECBC actively participated in and helped guide. This participation led to funding decisions that have improved ECBC’s campus, such as landscaping, restoration of the memorial placed at the Edgewood Area Front Gate, and new crosswalks. Funds have also been earmarked to repaint buildings E-3330 and E-3331. Together these changes improve the aesthetic quality of the campus and make it a more inviting place to work.

Edgewood Campus Sees Renovations, Modernizations and Demolitions

�� Building E-4301 CBRNE Product Development Facility

In 2016, ECBC continued to make extensive renovations to Building E-4301, formerly known as Downer Hall, turning it into ECBC’s state-of-the-art CBRNE Product Development Facility. These renovations included adding a 200-ton magnetic bearing centrifugal chiller. This modern energy efficient chiller replaced an older technology, a steam absorption chiller. This provides energy efficient air conditioning to the building’s office area. The next phase of renovation will include installation of energy efficient air conditioning for the rest of the facility. In addition, ECBC installed overhead lines to power the facility’s machine shop, removing the tripping hazard of power lines on the floor. Most of the other equipment from E-3516 was also relocated and connected to the building’s electric system which consolidated ECBC’s manufacturing in a single, modern building.

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ECBC has established modernization of Bldg. E-3330 as one of the center's infrastructure funding priorities.


�� Building E-5100 Laboratory Modernization

ECBC completed several mechanical room equipment upgrades including installation of two redundant clean dry air compressors for laboratory air services throughout the building, installing three vacuum pumps with expansion capacity to provide laboratory vacuums throughout the building, and installing an entirely new water treatment system. ECBC also added two redundant extreme high pressure compressed air systems along with back up reserve bottles for the facility’s mask testing mission. Finally, ECBC upgraded laboratory 610, adding new, wider and deeper hoods with the latest volume exhaust control systems and motion sensors for added safety and containment.

�� Obsolete Building Demolition Plans

In 2016, ECBC progressed with its ongoing support for the pre-demolition environmental assessments of obsolete and dilapidated laboratories and support facilities in the E-3200 block of Aberdeen Proving Ground as well as building E-3300. Working with the Aberdeen Proving Ground Directorate of Public Works and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, ECBC has been tasked by the Corps with supporting the contractor’s characterization efforts. This will include conducting environmental monitoring and sampling during the building surveys as inspectors look for any contaminants that may be present. Contaminants could include chemical and biological agent, radiological constituents, asbestos, lead-based paint, and polychlorinated biphenyls.

Once the buildings in the center of the ECBC campus area are demolished, the E-3200 block and E-3300 footprint will be available for the construction of a new generation of state-of-the-art research facilities as needed to sustain ECBC’s research mission into the 21st century.

Standardization of Equipment Maintenance Contracts Streamlines Support

Just as ECBC’s new construction benefited from centralization and organization-wide coordination in 2016, so has its method of contracting for equipment maintenance. The Facilities and Infrastructure Team created a single point of contact for each of the three directorates to go to for ordering work from equipment maintenance contractors for their numerous divisions and branches. The result has been that the work is better coordinated and the fees have been made uniform.

Cultivate InnovationStrategic Goal

ECBC researchers have developed a scarf-like mask that can be easily donned to give warfighters and first responders respiratory protection from riot-control agents.

objectives• Establish an inspirational framework

for innovation by upgrading our space, tools and work environment

• Enhance the Innovation Development of Employee Advanced Solutions program to support and promote innovative efforts across the center

• Create and optimize opportunities across the center to develop and transition innovative products and services


To address the enduring challenges represented by legacy and emerging chemical and biological threats, ECBC must cultivate innovation to drive the development of new products and services to protect our forces and citizens.

In 2016, ECBC established an inspirational framework for innovation by upgrading its space, tools and work environment by establishing MakerSpace, a collaborative workshop for developing prototypes using 3-D onsite printing.

2016 was the fourth year of ECBC’s Innovative Development of Employee Advanced Solutions, or IDEAS, Program. It supports and promotes innovative efforts across the center by providing seed money to good research ideas on a competitive basis. After four years, many of these funded ideas have come to fruition as customer-funded programs showing great promise and a high return on the initial investment.

ECBC created and optimized opportunities across the center to develop and transition innovative products and services by developing and testing a new modularized sensor system that fits on a drone, through the Joint CBRNE Advanced Capability Sets Advanced Technology Demonstration, and by bringing online an innovative new chemical agent testing laboratory.

“With the Cultivate Innovation strategic goal, ECBC aims to effect a fundamental culture shift away from passively responding to the requests of its customers in the chemical biological community toward a more entrepreneurial and proactive approach,” said Augustus Way Fountain III, Ph.D., ECBC’s senior research scientist for chemistry and champion of the Cultivate Innovation strategic goal. “The men and women at ECBC dedicate themselves to the chemical biological challenges warfighters face every day. Transforming this personal commitment into insights and initiatives that anticipate our warfighters needs, solve their practical problems, and make them more battle ready, is the true measure of ECBC’s effectiveness in the 21st century.”

In 2016, Fountain lead a gold team of ECBC leadership members on an all-day off-site discussion of this vision for the future. Together, they established a grand challenge for the center: To use materials science, additive manufacturing, and synthetic biology to create a nexus of innovative research competencies that can best respond to the chemical biological challenges of the new century.


$150,000, and the researchers are given eight months to conduct their study and compile results.

In 2016, ECBC approved eight projects averaging $67,000 each. The proposals funded the work of a broad range of scientific and engineering disciplines that solve a variety of chemical biological challenges. Here are some examples:

�� Sensitive Site Exploitation Using a Virtual Environment

Researchers built a detailed digital model of an illicit biological laboratory that warfighters and first responders can enter virtually using a low-cost head mounted display. The project team evaluated its effectiveness as a means of providing training experiences for sensitive site assessment in the classroom.

�� Carbon Nanotube Chemiselective Organophosphate Sensing Technology for Wearable Environmental Threat Monitoring

ECBC researchers are investigating the unique properties of carbon nanotube assemblies. Since their discovery in 1991, they have opened up a new era in materials science. They have an array of electronic, magnetic and mechanical properties that scientists are still exploring. ECBC researchers plan to impregnate carbon nanotube material with a probe compound that reacts selectively with organophosphates to see if it causes a readily observable change in the conductivity of the material. The research could lead to the implementation of sensing technology that is fueled by the underlying chemistry embedded in the device, while making possible a very compact and efficient sensor technology.

ECBC’s MakerSpace puts 3-D Printing Tools in Researchers’ Hands

MakerSpace is an ECBC workshop of state-of-the-art 3-D printers available to any ECBC employee to use for making mission-related product prototypes and specialty items. It offers users seven different types of 3-D printers and one laser cutter, plus the guidance of ECBC’s team of 3-D printing experts. MakerSpace participants begin by taking a one-hour safety course followed by one-on-one instruction on how to use the 3-D printer that is best suited for the item to be printed. Created to encourage innovation, MakerSpace is yet another product of ECBC’s innovation incubator, the IDEAS Program.

“Mastery of 3-D printing offers ECBC researchers enormous advantages,” said Brad Ruprecht, an engineering technician and model maker who has been working with additive manufacturing and 3-D printing for 13 years. “It can accelerate a project schedule and maximize its budget by allowing users to print prototype ideas without committing to formal outside prototype production. In the process, the product developer gets much more deeply engaged in the product, because by making the variations to the design directly, the researcher sees exactly how even the smallest design changes help or hurt its function. In effect, these printers provide tangible brainstorming, there is no bad idea.”

The team foresees a time in the future when MakerSpace will have contributed to every important product design across the center by placing additive manufacturing technology in everyone’s toolbox. If successful, the concept could eventually be made available to ECBC’s customers and partner laboratories and agencies.

Innovation Program Turns Researchers’ Ideas into New Technologies

ECBC’s Innovative Development of Employee Advanced Solutions (IDEAS) Program is designed to give researchers with promising new ideas the seed money to develop them. The goal is to turn them into practical solutions to chemical biological defense needs that can attract customer funding. The motto of the program, which began in 2012, is “fail fast and fail early,” and ECBC’s return on investment over the last four years is ten dollars for every one spent.

Proposals addressing any CBRNE defense solution can be submitted by any ECBC employee. A team of diverse subject matter experts reviews each submission for its creativity, value to the warfighter, potential to advance ECBC’s mission, and business potential. The selected proposals are provided funding ranging from $20,000 and

ECBC developed a virtual reality training module that allows warfighters and first responders to learn to recognize an illicit chemical or biological agent facility.


�� Paper-based Biodetection with Synthetic Gene Circuits and Nett Warrior Smartphone

This analytical system uses small strips of paper containing freeze-dried cell-free extracts and engineered DNA that effects a color change in the presence of agents of interest. The colors that appear and their arrangement indicates the type agent present. The strips are imaged by a handheld reader that communicates with a Smartphone for analysis. Eventually, this technology could be used in the field for broad-spectrum detection of chemical and biological agents and beyond.

�� 3-D Printing of Active Nanoparticles

The goal of this research project is to develop a method for 3-D printers to print metal-organic frameworks into functional forms, such as a respirator or filter. That way, the metal organic frameworks which trap and neutralize chemical agents are part of the printed material and not just embedded onto it after its manufacture. The goal is to develop printable, on-demand, high efficiency filters for use in future protective masks. Another potential application is printable circuits and sensing arrays. Researchers also hope to be able to print MOFs customized to target specific chemicals, such as nerve agents, explosives or various toxic industrial chemicals that can sense and signal the presence of toxic chemicals.

�� Materials Compatibility Study I 3-D Printed Materials and Chemical Agent Exposure

This study will explore a variety of materials used in 3-D printing to see how compatible they are with solvents and chemical agents. Samples will be examined for chemical differences before and after exposure using state-of-the-art analytical instruments. They will also be examined microscopically and mechanically using stress and strain tests to examine the impact of exposure on the objects themselves.

To ensure the selection of the most appropriate 3-D printer material to use in the manufacture a chemical agent protection material, a thorough analysis is needed that characterizes the compatibility of the materials with the chemicals.

�� Putting Nature to Work I Engineering Topical Probiotics for Nerve Agent Protection

This forward-looking project involves seeding beneficial probiotic bacteria found on the skin with an enzyme synthesized to destroy Sarin. Once successfully seeded, the bacteria cells carrying the enzyme will reproduce as part of the skin’s bacterial ecosystem and provide anyone who applies the probiotic bacteria to their skin as an ointment, lifetime protection from dermal exposure to the chemical agent.

�� Non-Invasive Biomarker Analysis Via Interstitial Fluid

The purpose of this project is to see if it is possible to use the fluid in the interstitial spaces between human tissue cells, which makes up 16 percent of human body weight, as a means to determine if a person has been exposed to chemical warfare agent. Building on an existing ECBC research project, the research team plans to explore the kinds of changes to interstitial fluid that occur in real time following a chemical agent exposure. A collective list of such changes is critical to building a "biomarkers' database. A key to this effort will be to build upon another existing research project at Sandia National Laboratory to design a means to constantly monitor those fluids using microneedles. The ultimate goal is to develop a wear-and-forget chemical agent sensor that can be placed on the skin of warfighters and first responders.

An ECBC scientist peels MOF fiber off an aluminum surface after electrospinning it in a laboratory

Non-Invasive Biomarker Analysis Via Interstitial Fluid will allow research teams to explore in real time the changes to interstitial fluid following a chemical agent exposure.


Modular Sensors Provide Options to Meet Anticipated Threats

Known as ACORNS, Array Configurable of Remote Network Sensors is a suite of modular sensors that can be snapped together into a single stack. Which sensors go in the stack depends on what is required for the mission. The ACORNS plug-and-play stack of sensors can be mounted on a tripod as a fixed point sensor or carried by unmanned aerial or ground vehicle. ACORNS allows mission planners to very quickly put together the precise selection of sensors needed to detect the anticipated threat, and to quickly change the sensor array if the initial fly-over suggests a different threat. Finally, the entire array of sensors that can be selected to go into ACORNS is assembled in a single storage and carrying case for easy access and transportation.

ACORNS was put to the test at the annual SK Challenge held at Dugway Proving Ground in the West Desert of Utah. This U.S. Army sponsored competition offers participants a low-cost opportunity to operate technology they have under development in a collaborative environment

At the 2016 SK Challenge, ECBC scientists and engineers modified existing sensor packages to fit inside the thermos-shaped ACORNS and affixed it to the bottom of a drone ECBC developed using IDEAS seed money. Another specially configured ACORNS unit was mounted on the roof of an autonomous ground vehicle. Chemical and biological simulants were released at random times in the middle of the night, the sensors placed in ACORNS successfully identified the simulants as they were encountered and sent accurate data back to the awaiting ECBC operators.

With the ACORNS concept confirmed, the ECBC research team that created it plans to expand the variety of sensors it can carry, and make its interface the standard for chemical biological sensors and vehicle platforms across the force.

Innovation Program Paves Way for Standoff Detection Lab

CASTLE, which stands for CBRNE Assessment, Science and Technology Lab at ECBC, is designed for long-distance surface detection testing in a surety setting. Most

A warfighter attaches an ACORNS module containing chemical agent sensors to the bottom of a drone developed by ECBC to carry the sensor package.


laboratories that deal with chemical and biological agent testing can only test detectors from just a few inches away. In the CASTLE, researchers can test chemical and biological detectors from up to 24 meters away. This new capability will provide better assessment of detection equipment before it gets into the hands of warfighters.

CASTLE is designed to test innovations in detection systems under development. It can challenge these systems against low-volatility materials laying on surfaces, including powder, dust and liquids in various scenarios at these long distances.

But it is also an innovation in itself. CASTLE is a product of ECBC’s IDEAS Program. A team of ECBC researchers submitted the idea for CASTLE and earned funding to stand up the CASTLE lab within three years. The CASTLE team exceeded expectations by developing the laboratory in less than a year.

Currently, ECBC is using CASTLE to perform tests for the Republic of Korea, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical and Biological Defense.

The ability to detect contaminated areas at a distance is a critical need of U.S. armed forces and first responders. It helps them evaluate whether or not a potentially contaminated area is safe without having to come in direct contact with it and risk exposure. Most detectors require the user to get close to the potentially contaminated scene. There are several detectors and methods designed for long-range detection in the works. However, in order for these to make it into the hands of the end users, the devices need the kind of sophisticated testing CASTLE offers.

The CBRNE Assessment, Science and Technology Lab at ECBC is designed for long-distance surface detection testing in a surety setting.

Collaborate and Communicate

Strategic Goal

ECBC researchers collaborate with U.S. Marines to evaluate commercial laser range finders to identify targets as part of the Marine Corps Innovation Challenge.

objectives• Foster collaboration

across ECBC.

• Strengthen and grow ECBC’s external partnerships.

• Facilitate collaborative decision-making across the chemical-biological defense enterprise.


ECBC strives to foster collaboration, both internally and with external partners. Good ideas and critical capabilities are found throughout the enterprise, and we want to leverage them with complementary contributions to ensure mutual success.

A powerful example of collaboration in 2016 was our Coffee with Colleagues, an ECBC-wide event for exchanging technical ideas. Another example was our planning process for integrating the Life Sciences Division at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, from the Army Test and Evaluation Command. And collaboration was also central to such highly innovative technical projects as Deep Purple, ACORNS, and the Layered Sensing Initiative.

ECBC strengthened and grew its external collaborations through our international partnerships, through our work with the Army Research Laboratory to design safer helmets for Soldiers—and professional football players—and through our work in partnership with Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis to develop a new technology for mobile analytical laboratories using paper to absorb and release samples for analysis.

ECBC facilitated collaborative decision-making across our organization through the work of our employee-created Internal Communications Working Group.

“Collaboration is not just people working together and helping each other,” said Paul Tanenbaum, Ph.D., director of program integration and the senior champion of the Collaborate and Communicate strategic goal. “It’s diverse parties, each working on a common problem, using their unique skills in such a way that none of them can succeed unless everyone else does too.”

He and his implementation team for this strategic goal aim to enhance ECBC’s products and services by strengthening ECBC’s culture. That entails building networks within the organization and with external partners, leveraging one another’s strengths, and building on shared interests. A natural complement to collaboration is communication. As Tanenbaum explained, “Strengthening communication is critical to organizational alignment and permits all the good ideas from throughout our diverse team to shape our shared future.”


Coffee with Colleagues Stimulates Collaboration

ECBC’s sixth Coffee with Colleagues event featured a poster session highlighting achievements across the center in 2016. Researchers, field operations personnel, and technicians from ECBC’s various directorates, divisions, and branches came together to share and discuss their work over the past year. More than 350 attendees mingled in the aisles, viewing the 140 posters on display and interacting with the team members standing ready to explain each project. Posters for classified and sensitive projects were presented in a separate, secure room.

The Coffee with Colleagues initiative had begun as an event for one division within ECBC, and then included a second division. Soon ECBC leadership saw the value of the venue for encouraging the sharing of ideas among staff from across the center, so in 2015 the program was expanded center-wide. The resulting cross-pollination of ideas among our research, engineering, operations, business, and administration teams has enhanced many ECBC efforts.

In a friendly competition, judges from other organizations within the chemical-biological defense enterprise selected winners in six categories: chemistry, biology, physical sciences, design, operations, and classified. There was also a people’s-choice award presented to a winner selected by all of the Coffee with Colleagues attendees.

Integration Plan Guides Transition of BioTesting Branch

Effective July 1, 2016, the Secretary of the Army reassigned the Life Sciences Division at Dugway Proving Ground from the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command to ECBC. This facility, with its staff of government and contract employees, became ECBC’s third permanent satellite location and was renamed the BioTesting Branch. Its core mission—to use its unique technologies and facilities for biological agent detection system testing and evaluation—remained unchanged.

ECBC met the challenge of knitting together the two distinct organizational missions and cultures by assembling an interdisciplinary transition team of subject-matter

Approximately 350 people attended ECBC’s sixth Coffee with Colleagues showcase. The Coffee with Colleagues initiative is meant to allow members of the workforce to share ideas.


experts from both organizations to address every facet of the integration process. These facets, or focus areas, included safety, surety, property management, information management, environmental compliance, contract support, quality insurance/quality control, test processes and procedures, training, and communications.

The transition team worked closely with the rest of the BioTesting personnel at Dugway Proving Ground to assess their current practices in each focus area and determined the practices that could benefit from closer conformity to ECBC’s best practices. The team then established a timetable with specific actions to achieve that alignment. By the end of 2016, all parties involved had a clear path forward and the integration plan was in its execution phase.

“It was a big win for all of us,” said Cheri Withers, the leader of ECBC’s Decision Analysis Team and of the transition-planning effort. “The plan made it possible for everyone to be on the same page in each of the focus areas, and it provided a forum for the people involved in each area to share ideas and collaborate. It also created a way for the various focus areas to coordinate with each other so that

they could share resources and share ideas despite the large number of moving parts.”

Deep Purple Flies Out to Meet the Threat

Deep Purple is a quadcopter drone assembled from both commercial off-the-shelf parts and custom-made carbon-fiber pieces. ECBC developed it over the course of a year and a half in a partnership with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). It is capable of carrying a five-pound payload of chemical and biological sensors housed in a cylinder attached to its belly and, using APL-developed software, it can make precision landings on very small designated targets.

ECBC engineers built Deep Purple using ECBC’s 3-D printers to build a series of prototypes culminating in the current version. APL provided software tools to optimize the design’s combination of motors, batteries, and propellers. The engineers were able to iteratively design improvements quickly thanks to the rapid 3-D printing capabilities of ECBC’s Advanced Design and Manufacturing Division.

ECBC joined with technology developers from private industry and other Army and joint organizations to test a new integrated system of chemical and biological agent sensors at Dugway Proving Ground’s West Desert Test Center in Utah.


For example, the propeller arms have slits for air cooling, but the slits also function as crumple areas during a hard landing, which minimizes damage to sensitive components.

For the flat center of the drone, rather than use the carbon fiber, which is functionally inert, Deep Purple’s designers used two printed circuit boards. The boards form the body of the drone and also allow for direct, real-time communication between the payload and the drone operator. Having the circuit boards perform double duty as structural components also saves weight, a critical goal for an aircraft of any size.

The information that Deep Purple’s sensors acquire can be passed to Soldiers in the field and immediately communicated to the unit’s command and control in real time from as far away as two miles. Operators control the drone from their computers and can use the data as fast as the sensors send it back for mapping chemical and biological hot zones.

Layered Sensing Initiative Shares Vital Data in Real Time

ECBC’s Layered Sensing Initiative uses multiple systems to integrate data from multiple fixed ground sensors and from mobile autonomous ground and aerial vehicles that have onboard chemical and biological sensors to map and track an aerial plume. It also integrates conventional and thermal

imaging cameras, ground surveillance radar, and seismic and acoustic sensors, forming many layers of detection.

The data is compiled and displayed in a single communications platform that allows the human controllers to direct unmanned ground and aerial vehicles to intercept the plume. All the components of the integrated, layered system can talk to each other and to the system’s operators. Layered Sensing has been embraced across the U.S. armed services, by sensor equipment vendors, and by allied militaries, as the beginning of a net-centric operations future for chemical biological defense.

ECBC’s Layered Sensing Initiative team members worked in close coordination with the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center to develop software that would integrate it with the Joint Warning and Reporting Network, called JWARN. JWARN serves as the hub of CBRNE communication and warning system. This interoperability vastly improves its value as a tactical tool for warfighters. The Layered Sensing Initiative may have a role in facilitating better communication between future CBRNE sensing technologies such as wearable sensors, personal communication devices such as Nett Warrior, and cloud-based platforms shared by the U.S. military and relevant healthcare agencies around the world.

International Collaboration Fosters Partnerships

The mission of ECBC’s international programs is to identify new science and technology opportunities to improve chemical and biological defense by sharing information and exchanging subject matter experts with partner nations.

One of the highlights for 2016 was the visit of ECBC Director Joseph L. Corriveau, Ph.D, to defense sites in Helsinki and Tampere, Finland to kick off a bilateral data exchange annex for chemical and biological defense. He also visited the Swedish Defense Research Agency to further enhance chemical and biological defense research cooperation. This includes taking a strategic approach to better equipping the warfighter to counter weapons of mass destruction.

ECBC is also very active in the Engineer and Scientist Exchange Program, known as ESEP. It is managed by the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Defense Exports and Cooperation. ESEP features a highly competitive selection process. Organizations wishing to participate submit applicant packages, which are compared to other submissions from organizations throughout the Army. ECBC currently has two researchers serving in ESEP positions, one in the United Kingdom and one in the Netherlands.

ECBC’s Layered Sensing Initiative, tested at Dugway Proving Ground’s West Desert Test Center in Utah, uses unmanned ground vehicles to intercept potential chemical and biological dangers.


ECBC researchers worked with other Army organizations and private industry to develop a model of a National Football League helmet could reduce the number of brain injuries.

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And on the flip side of ESEP, ECBC hosts foreign scientists and engineers from partner nations. They are funded by their parent organizations and serve at ECBC for anywhere from six to 18 months. ECBC currently has two foreign scientists, one from Japan and one from the United Kingdom.

The incoming and outgoing ESEPs work under pre-approved position descriptions intended to broaden their professional experience and capabilities. They also look for synergies between the host and parent organizations to develop mutually beneficial collaborative engagements.

Army Researchers Tackle Head Injuries on the Battlefield and the Football Field

A team of Army researchers is currently working with the NFL to increase the safety of players and Soldiers alike. The league recently released data for 2015 that showed the number of player concussions had reached a four-year high. Almost a third of those injuries were from helmet-to-helmet collisions. And since 2000, more than 313 thousand service members have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries, largely due to improvised explosive devices. The injuries suffered by the two groups are very similar. Changing the equipment they wear is a common imperative for both.

The Army effort won funding from Head Health Challenge II, a competition sponsored by the NFL, Under Armour, and General Electric to encourage design innovations for preventing and identifying brain injuries. A team of scientists and engineers that included members from the Army Research Laboratory, ECBC, private industry, and academia developed a system that tethers one’s helmet to one’s body.

The system uses rate-dependent tethers that allow freedom of motion at low speeds but provide high-force resistance during faster, more sudden events, such as tackling and colliding with the ground. The group’s experiments show that this technology can reduce peak head acceleration, an important factor correlating with injury, by 50 percent.

The team developed an instrumented mannequin to mimic a football player falling backwards and striking the back of his head on the ground with the high force and velocity of a typical tackle. During this motion, the tethers stiffen the link between helmet and body, which inhibits the violent motion when the head hits the ground.

Over the next year, the design team will be working with commercial partners to convert this laboratory concept into a wearable garment for sports and military applications.

ECBC Explores Paper Spray Technology in Collaboration with Academia

When Soldiers encounter an unknown threat in the field, they need to be able to find out its precise identity quickly, whether it is chemical, biological, explosive, or an illicit drug. The technology used should require minimal training.

ECBC researchers, in collaboration with an inventor and professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, are developing a method that uses paper spray ionization mass spectrometry. Onto a small piece of paper contained in a disposable plastic cartridge, a Soldier can collect a sample of a liquid, including blood, urine, or any suspicious substance. Samples absorbed on the paper are stable at room temperature. And unlike with other methodologies, these samples require no further preparation for analysis. And there’s a further advantage over other analytical methods: the Soldier taking the sample need not know anything about what the sample’s chemical composition might be.

Once in the laboratory, the cartridge is inserted into an auto-sampler, which wets the paper with solvent, thus extracting the sample. Then an electric charge atomizes the sample into droplets that a mass spectrometer can analyze. The analytical results are ready in 60 seconds or less.

The ECBC and Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis research team are currently developing a form of paper that can absorb large biological molecules, which has always proven difficult using paper absorption. Once fully developed, this technology will extend to paper-based analysis of a broad spectrum of biological threats.

Internal Communications Working Group Chartered at ECBC

A group of ECBC employees are advancing the Collaborate and Communicate strategic goal by establishing a working group to collect and implement


ideas to enhance internal communications. One goal is to educate the workforce on the wide range of projects and activities going on around them every day at ECBC. The idea for the group is an outcome of ECBC’s Leadership Cohort Program, in which participants form teams that design long-term projects to pursue after the program is over.

“So many of us are so busy with our own projects that we never get out of our own buildings and see the other amazing things going on around us,” said Patricia Buckley, Ph.D., a research microbiologist and member of the group. “The more people at ECBC know about each other’s research, the more opportunities for collaboration will open up. I’m particularly interested in the possibilities for collaboration between directorates.”

ECBC senior leadership approved the organization’s charter in October 2016, and their first project was to establish tours of the ECBC campus to be given every two months. The tours are open to all interested members of the workforce.

The group is also working on a ‘find your expert’ capability to allow people to connect with ECBC’s many subject-matter experts, based on their coworkers’ areas of expertise.

“I think both these initiatives will help get people out of their stovepipes and get them talking to each other,” said Buckley. “There are so many people here at ECBC doing so many interesting things. Sharing that knowledge could lead all kinds of possibilities for new research.”

Deliver Quality Products and Services

Strategic Goal

ECBC successfully delivers quality products and services through our expertise and collaboration among our workforce and clients.

objectives• Facilitate technology transition.

• Optimize engineering support to augment acquisition processes.

• Develop best practices to strengthen the center’s ability to provide affordable, value-added capabilities to our customers.


ECBC leverages its institutional excellence to enable each customer’s success. The center achieves this end by successfully executing programs and delivering quality products and services.

In 2016, ECBC facilitated technology transition and optimized engineering support to augment acquisition processes by broadening the concept of how protection from CBRNE threats is provided to the warfighter. That rethinking entails seeing CBRNE threat responses as an integrated system of systems or capability sets rather than individual pieces of protective equipment or detectors. For example, ECBC system designers consider whether a chemical biological detector should emphasize earlier warning or greater sensitivity in identifying chemical biological agent compounds, or whether personal protective equipment should provide more comfort for long-term wearing or more ease of donning and doffing in response to a threat identification.

These tradeoffs are then matched to varying battlefield chemical biological threats such as artillery salvos versus improvised explosive devices versus drones versus barrel bombs. This analysis produces a suite of scenario-based solution sets for planners along the entire acquisition life cycle to consider, encouraging holistic thinking from design conception to fielding. The place where this new way of thinking takes place is ECBC’s Systems Integration Laboratory where warfighters, researchers, engineers, acquisition personnel, and the customer engage in a process known as the Analytical Framework. Together, they provide strategic insight, portfolio oversight, warfighter operational risk reduction, and data driven information for decision makers.

The Systems Integration Laboratory and Analytical Framework began in late 2015 when the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical and Biological Defense and ECBC joined forces to embark on a broad cultural shift away from stove-piped disciplines maintained within branches, divisions, and directorates. It supports a broader movement toward integrated teams spanning the entire acquisition cycle. The Systems Integration Laboratory is where requirement writers, doctrine creators, science and technology experts, materiel developers, the operational test community, warfighters and program managers can collaborate, share information, and test out ideas.

The Systems Integration Laboratory provides the tools to allow us to perform portfolio analyses, design systems, perform trade-offs and wargame proposed solutions virtually while partnering with stakeholders. These teams collaborate with our customers to deliver capability sets directed toward the evolving needs of the warfighter rather than just individual products meant to fill immediate gaps. The goal is to ensure defense dollars within the CBRNE community are allocated efficiently by giving customers enhanced decision-making tools to determine how best to use available resources.


Systems Integration Lab Supports Collaborative Solutions to Capability Gaps

The Analytical Framework uses modeling and simulation tools, as well as system engineering tools and principles, to develop an end-to-end analysis. This comprehensive analysis provides chemical biological defense program leaders with the information they need to make decisions based on what best reduces operational risk to the warfighter.

Traditionally, chemical biological defense technology is developed, fielded, and then improved incrementally over a course of years by developing better versions of the fielded technology. Warfighter input is critical to this process, but the input must make its way to the Pentagon and to technology developers.

The parties to this process are the doctrine developers, science and technology experts, materiel developers, the operational test community, and finally the program manager for that technology. Each of these parties operates independently of the others, handing off the

technology as it winds its way through the development phase managed by that party. As a result, a new chemical biological defense technology typically takes eight to ten years to wind its way through the acquisition cycle.

The Analytical Framework is a method of bringing these five groups together at the earliest conceptual stage of a new technology’s development. They share data from three sources. One is combat analytics, which uses a software program called One Semi-Automated Forces, or OneSAF, which models chemical biological effects and behaviors on the battlefield. OneSAF allows users to model and simulate combat scenarios with intelligent, doctrinally correct behaviors at the brigade level and below. This effort allows the integrated development team using OneSAF to test various design possibilities in simulated operational combat scenarios.

Another is portfolio analytics, which contains data on all of the chemical biological community’s current technologies and capabilities broken out into mission areas down to the tactical sub-tasks. Each technology can be scored against documented requirements and operational tasks, identifying gaps in the current portfolio and areas in need of investment.

The Analytical Framework uses simulation tools to develop a full lifecycle analysis of chemical and biological defense products.


The third is system analytics, which provides a virtual environment in which trades between capabilities for a technology can be gamed out on a computer. It is called Tradespace. For example, it can test if improving early warning in a detector also increases false alarms and it can establish the optimum balance between the two. It even takes into account tertiary factors such as the benefit to warfighters of reducing the time they have to wear personal protective equipment while accomplishing the mission. All possible options can be explored in this virtual environment so that failures occur quickly and are only virtual. The team can specify the requirements for the first prototype with vastly more information than ever before.

Taken together, the Systems Integration Laboratory and Analytical Framework approach enables all the parties to a new technology to work together to establish the feasible bounds of the technology’s requirements at the outset, and understand and prioritize technical attributes based

on operational effectiveness, faster. The end result is an enormous reduction in the time needed to get the best version of the technology into the hands of the warfighter.

“This will provide the center with a growing cadre of Analytical Framework subject matter experts that can engage doctrine developers, science and technology experts, materiel developers, the operational test community, and program managers in a rich dialogue to the benefit of the warfighter,” said Michael Abaie, director of engineering and Deliver Quality Products and Services strategic goal champion. “They will serve as an advisory group to senior leadership at our chemical biological partner organizations on acquisition cycle optimization and test matters, but more than that, they will bring culture change to the chemical biological community.”

Even as ECBC plans and implements this technology development revolution, the center continues to provide quality product and services to its customers.

ECBC’s Strategic Test Cell initiative aids in the evaluation of chemical and biological program efforts by pulling together the best subject matter experts from across the center.


Strategic Test Cell Matches Test Strategies with Evaluation Needs

New chemical biological technologies become programs of record because Pentagon leaders recognize the importance of getting them into the hands of warfighters soon. ECBC’s Strategic Test Cell initiative aids that effort by pulling together the best subject matter experts from across the center, and other chemical biological defense organizations, to collaboratively determine how best to make ‘soon’ happen.

“We function just like a tiger team pulling in the best people from wherever they may be to provide affordable, value-added capabilities and test support to our customers,” said Candace Coyle, Ph.D. an ECBC physical chemist and leader of the Strategic Test Cell initiative.

Strategic planning to get the most for the money at the least amount of risk is a complicated undertaking. It requires the team to solve systemic test issues in the areas of data requirement development, test planning, and infrastructure utilization to help answer the question: “Will the system being tested meet the needs of the warfighter?”

The Strategic Test Cell initiative was stood up in March 2016 and it pulls together people from all three ECBC directorates as needed for each new project to be analyzed. They do this based on the cell’s in-depth knowledge of technical and acquisition topics, and awareness of ECBC’s capabilities and many subject matter experts. For example, Research and Technology Directorate scientists can provide advice on how the threat science influences test design. Engineering Directorate technical and acquisition specialists have a detailed understanding of how the acquisition cycle works and develop how technical requirements can be tested. Directoral of Program Integration operations specialists have in-depth knowledge of how chemical biological technologies are used in the field. Building these innovative teams leads to more efficient testing with the Strategic Test Cell serving as a liaison to the customer, ensuring that the customer hears one voice.

“The cell is already proving its worth at making every research dollar count by offering test resourcing and cost-saving solutions to customer programs,” said Coyle. For example, ECBC performed much of the technology maturation and risk reduction testing in a high profile project to develop the Next Generation Chemical Detector (NGCD), a program of record executed by the Joint Project Manager for Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Contamination Avoidance using its one-of-a-kind Non-Traditional Agent Defense Test System. The program seeks to field three new chemical detection capabilities to warfighters across the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

ECBC partnered with the U.S. Army West Desert Test Center at Dugway Proving Ground to submit a consolidated proposal to support engineering and manufacturing development testing of the NGCD 1 and 3 variants. The two organizations worked together to combine their respective technical strengths to solve capacity challenges and reduce project risk. This collaboration would generate $1.1 million in savings and a 21-month reduction in schedule for the customer.

ECBC’s Operations Arm Helps U.S. Continue Chemical Weapons Destruction under Treaty

ECBC’s Chemical Biological Applications and Risk Reduction business unit, popularly known as CBARR, has earned a reputation as the world’s premier chemical biological weapons material field response team. The Program Executive Office Assembled Chemical Weapons (PEO ACWA) chose the U.S. Army Chemical Materials Activity’s (CMA) Explosive Destruction System (EDS) to augment the Pueblo Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant, known as PCAPP. As a result, CBARR was selected to operate the EDS at the U.S. Army Pueblo Chemical Depot, Colorado.

PCAPP was built to destroy 8 percent of the declared U.S. chemical weapons stockpile which has been stored at the Pueblo Chemical Depot since the 1950s.

The PCAPP EDS supports the destruction of munitions by destroying chemical agent munitions that cannot be easily processed through the PCAPP facility’s automated systems. Designed to destroy recovered chemical munitions, the system’s main component is a sealed stainless-steel vessel that contains the blast, vapor and fragments.

The CBARR team conducted this first campaign from March 2015 – February 2016, destroying 560 munitions and containers — including 155mm and 105mm projectiles, 4.2-inch mortar rounds and Department of Transportation cylinders — containing mustard agent. The CBARR team included specially trained operators, a safety officer, an environmental specialist, sample technicians, chemists, program managers and a site supervisor. During the course of the project, CBARR performed site setup of the system, systemization, operator training, chemical operations, and a warm shut-down.

The PCAPP Explosive Destruction System project allowed the United States to resume destruction of stockpiled chemical agent. It ended a pause in destruction activity between 2012 — when CMA completed destruction of the nearly 90 percent of stockpiled chemical agents under


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An operator prepares to destroy 155mm projectiles, which are mustard agent-filled munitions, set to be destroyed in the Explosive Destruction System at the U.S. Army Pueblo Chemical Depot. (Photo Courtesy I PEO ACWA)


its control — and the beginning of the destruction of the remainder of the U.S. stockpile of chemical weapons assigned to PEO ACWA in March 2015.

“Completion of this campaign allowed the United States to report more than 1.91 U.S. tons of agent destroyed to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW),” said Greg Mohrman, PCAPP site project manager. The OPCW is the international organization in charge of enforcing the Chemical Weapons Convention, a multilateral arms control treaty which prohibits the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons.

Future PCAPP Explosive Destruction System campaigns will continue to support stockpile destruction.

ECBC Trainers Teach Warfighters and First Responders to Deal with Weapons of Mass Destruction

In responding to CBRNE threats, there is no room for on-the-job training. So members of the armed forces, intelligence agencies and the EPA who are charged with CBRNE responses call upon ECBC for real-world training customized to their organization’s particular mission.

These responders confront some of the deadliest substance known to man, and must be able identify a weapons of mass destruction manufacturing, storage or distribution site. They must also know how to secure the site, interrogate the site, take samples, and, for some organizations, be able to safely remove the substances. ECBC’s Advanced CBRNE Training Team teaches these responders to recognize and respond to a wide variety of scenarios. These include a manufacturing laboratory in anything from a private home to a warehouse to a ship, or even a baseball stadium.

Each scenario comes with its own risks and set of clues. ECBC’s team teaches responders how to put the clues together as they approach a site, and how to recognize special hazards. Are the agents being stockpiled or are they already weaponized and ready for use? How sophisticated are the agent manufacturers? If there are already casualties, how much can be learned from them?

“We give each class a scenario geared to the particulars of their organization’s mission within the world of CBRNE,” said team leader Carrie Poore, Ph.D. “We make sure they truly understand how their detection equipment works, and when they might not be able to trust the data they’re getting from it.”

Poore’s team also teaches training participants how to properly decontaminate their protective clothing, their instruments, and any containers they bring out. “We have

very high standards for them to meet,” said Poore. “Safety for themselves and the surrounding public is number one. But there is the added pressure that in some scenarios, their work is scrutinized by not only their organization’s leadership, but by the public via the news media.”

The list of organizations that ECBC trains is a who’s who of the CBRNE community. It includes the US. Army 20th CBRNE Command, the US. Army’s chemical battalions, the Army National Guard Civil Support Teams, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other military organizations. This work has taken the team all over the world. They have conducted training in Korea, Kuwait, Canada, Cambodia, and Spain, as well as Army installations throughout the United States.

“This training offered us something we don’t usually get, very specific instruction in agent response and recovery techniques taught by people who have done it all,” said Charlie Fitzsimmons, an EPA On-Scene Coordinator posted at Fort Meade, Md. “Theory can’t replace the ECBC instructors’ on-the ground experience, they have tried and true methods we can adopt.”

ECBC Creates Software to Ensure DoD Biological Select Agents and Toxins Tracking and Surety

Department of Defense research laboratories and their contractor laboratories handle some of the most deadly toxins in the world, everything from anthrax to ricin to Ebola. Within the Department of Defense research

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After a 2015 incident in which live anthrax spores were inadvertently sent to laboratories throughout the network, the Department of Defense issued a directive requiring the establishment of standards to safeguard these biological select agents and toxins, or BSAT for short. They then turned to ECBC to develop a system that would track their movements and ensure compliance with Department of Defense, Centers for Disease Control and Department of Agriculture surety requirements.

An ECBC team of software developers located at Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois began its efforts with a U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases prototype called the BSAT Database Application. The program was still in the development stages and not yet ready for use on a secure network. In the spring of 2016, the team began making extensive upgrades. The final product, which they launched DoD-wide in December, is able to track the movement of BSAT material from the laboratory of origin to its research laboratory destination. Upon its arrival at the research laboratory, the system tracks which refrigerator in which room it is placed, on which shelf within the refrigerator, and even where on that shelf it is located. It further tracks the uses of the BSAT material and documents its proper disposal by its ‘destroy by’ date.

But this was only one part of an even larger tracking and information sharing system for BSAT materials. Under the direction of the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical and Biological Defense (JPEO-CBD), the ECBC team created the Joint Interagency Biosafety System, or JIBS — an umbrella software system that links to the BSAT Application and to a previously existing secure website for ordering BSAT material known as the Ordering System for Critical Assays and Reagents, or OSCAR for short. JIBS also hosts a BSAT standard operating procedure document library, ordering forms, and shipment approval forms. In addition, it sends out laboratory network-wide announcements, and shares information on best practices to the Department of Defense BSAT research community.

The team is now busy working on a BSAT Applications version 2 for launch in June 2017. Currently JPEO-CBD is working with the laboratories in the network to find out what types of new features and changes to existing features are needed. Version 2 will also automate audit and archiving functions for the laboratories.

“The ECBC development team at Rock Island has once again provided a quality product that will have an immediate positive impact on the entire chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear community and the DoD,” said Donnie Green, project manager for business systems on the JPEO-CBD Knowledge Management Team.

director'sperspective

yesterday, today, and tomorrow

The technology within the U.S. Army Edgewood Chemical Biological Center has changed significantly over the past century; what hasn’t changed is the dedication of our workforce to keep our nation safe.


At the U.S. Army Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, we drive to meet the challenges before us while frequently checking our rearview mirror. We remember that the chemical and biological solutions that seem so simple compared to today’s technology presented daunting challenges to those who came before us, and we respect the innovation and dedication of our nation’s pioneers in chemical and biological protection.

We recognize the contributions of those who came before us with a series of centennial events commemorating ECBC’s rich history and many accomplishments.

In 1917, with the United States fully committed in World War I, President Woodrow Wilson designated the area now known as Aberdeen Proving Ground – South as the site of the nation’s first plant for the filling of chemical shells. As the war progressed, the location became the home of U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service, which over the next century would evolve into the U.S. Army Edgewood Chemical Biological Center.

Over the course of World War I, chemical weapons such as chlorine, phosgene, and mustard agent killed about 90 thousand and injured about 1.1 million on both sides of the conflict. In the early days of the war, the only protective measures available to U.S. Soldiers against the chlorine gas used by German forces were cotton pads that the Soldiers would soak in urine and place over their mouths and noses. The Army Chemical Warfare Service quickly modified a British protective mask to create the first U.S. protective mask and produced more than three million by the war’s end.

Likewise, the Soldiers of WWI had no reliable means of detecting chemical agent other than the sniff test, which required a Soldier to physically smell the air for the garlic scent of mustard or the irritating burn of chlorine. Fielding a reliable detector for mustard agent eluded the Chemical Warfare Service until 1942 when, faced with a second world war, it introduced the M4 Vapor Detector Kit. The M4 featured an early form of colorimetrics, a color-changing technology, to produce a blue color in the presence of mustard agent.

In the decades that followed, research and development of chemical weapons protection, detection, and decontamination continued. Protective masks, which had started as bulky filter boxes connected by hoses, evolved into pieces of integrated tactical gear offering increased vision, communications capability, drinking capability, and easier respiration. Likewise, chemical agent detectors advanced from a refrigerator-sized device capable of detecting only nerve agent to today’s Joint Chemical Agent Detector, which fits in a pocket and is capable of detecting nerve, blister, and blood agent as well as toxic industrial compounds.


Despite the establishment of international treaties, chemical weapons continued to appear on the world stage. In the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Iraq employed mustard agent, Tabun, and Sarin against Iranian and Kurdish targets, both military and civilian, resulting in casualties estimated at more than 30 thousand. Because international treaties did not completely eliminate the chemical and biological threat, ECBC continued to develop more advanced protection for U.S. forces. For instance, ECBC replaced the M17 Mask with the M40 Mask in 1987. The M40 had many improvements over the M17, including better vision, increased comfort, and easier maintenance.

Mustard agent and the chemical precursors of Sarin again made world news in 2014, when the government of Syria agreed to turn over its declared stockpile of chemical weapons to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the United Nations. ECBC designed, built, installed, and then operated its Field Deployable Hydrolysis System aboard a U.S. Maritime Administration cargo vessel. ECBC system operators safely destroyed more than 600 tons of Syrian chemical warfare material at sea in just 42 days.

Our predecessors faced the challenges of protecting our warfighters through two world wars and multiple other conflicts around the world. Today, ECBC rises to meet the challenges of protecting our warfighters and our nation from chemical and biological threats in a rapidly changing world. We’re growing and supporting a diverse workforce with world-class talent. We’re sustaining and modernizing our infrastructure to ensure that our workforce has the most advanced equipment available in order to maximize our capabilities. We’re cultivating innovation to explore new, cutting-edge ideas and we’re collaborating and communicating to develop those ideas in quality products and services that will enable our Nation to protect its warfighters and its citizens from chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.

Over the course of a century, ECBC has innovated and adapted to meet the chemical and biological threats on both the battlefield and the world stage. Today, we build upon that century of innovation and our legacy of solutions as we face the challenges of the next 100 years of service to our Nation.

Joseph L. Corriveau, Ph.D. ECBC Director

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