The Environmental Research Institute of Michigan (ERIM) was a

research institute A research institute, research centre, research center or research organization, is an establishment founded for doing research. Research institutes may specialize in basic research or may be oriented to applied research. Although the term often i ...

Ann Arbor, Michigan Ann Arbor is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the county seat of Washtenaw County, Michigan, Washtenaw County. The 2020 United States census, 2020 census recorded its population to be 123,851. It is the principal city of the Ann Arbor ...

, founded in 1972. The institute contributed to the development of remote sensing, radar, and holography. ERIM grew out of a military and environmental research arm of the University of Michigan, the

Michigan Aeronautical Research Center The Michigan Aeronautical Research Center (MARC) was one of America's leading air research organizations, run by the University of Michigan at Willow Run Airport. It played a leading role in the creation of the Bomarc Missile Program, alongside Boe ...

, later known as the Willow Run Research Center. A for-profit enterprise, ERIM International, split off from it in 1997. This was successively acquired by Veridian Corporation, by

General Dynamics General Dynamics Corporation (GD) is an American publicly traded, aerospace and defense corporation headquartered in Reston, Virginia. As of 2020, it was the fifth-largest defense contractor in the world by arms sales, and 5th largest in the Uni ...

- moving to Ypsilanti - and in 2014 by MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA). Meanwhile, the remaining non-profit portion became the

Altarum Institute Altarum is a nonprofit research and consulting organization that serves government health insurers, health foundations, and other nonprofit clients that focus on health and health care. Altarum traces its history back to 1946 as Willow Run Labor ...

in 2001. Part of Altarum was in 2006 merged into the

Michigan Tech Research Institute The Michigan Tech Research Institute (MTRI) is a research center of Michigan Technological University Michigan Technological University (Michigan Tech, MTU, or simply Tech) is a public research university in Houghton, Michigan, founded in 1885 ...

(MTRI), conducting environmental and remote sensing research, while health systems research continues at Altarum Institute.

History

The Environmental Research Institute of Michigan (ERIM) began as Willow Run Laboratories in 1946, but was established as a private not for profit research institute when it formally separated from the University of Michigan in 1972. ERIM contributed to the development of remote sensing for

environmental A biophysical environment is a biotic and abiotic surrounding of an organism or population, and consequently includes the factors that have an influence in their survival, development, and evolution. A biophysical environment can vary in scale f ...

and military applications. Much of the laboratory's early history is not publicized because ERIM and its predecessor organizations were developing remote sensing and

surveillance Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior, many activities, or information for the purpose of information gathering, influencing, managing or directing. This can include observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment, such as c ...

systems to collect military intelligence from aircraft and satellites.''What's ERIM? Secretive Past, Automotive Future''
/ref>

Willow Run Laboratories

Prior to Willow Run Laboratories's establishment in 1946, with the

Cold War The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because the ...

just beginning, the War Department was concerned about keeping the U.S. in the forefront of applied science. University researchers newly returned from WWII service were anxious to use their expertise to address those concerns.''History of the Michigan Tech Research Institute.''
/ref> At the University of Michigan's College of Engineering, Professors

William Gould Dow William Gould Dow (September 30, 1895 – October 17, 1999) was an American scientist, educator and inventor. He was a pioneer in a variety of fields, including electrical engineering, space research, computer engineering, and nuclear eng ...

and Emerson W. Conlon approached Wright-Patterson Air Force Base scientists with their proposal to conduct a large-scale research project. The project was designed to prove the feasibility of what would later be referred to as an

antiballistic missile system An anti-ballistic missile (ABM) is a surface-to-air missile designed to counter ballistic missiles (missile defense). Ballistic missiles are used to deliver nuclear, chemical, biological, or conventional warheads in a ballistic flight traject ...

. The proposal was accepted, called WIZARD, and it was this contract that gave birth to ERIM's first predecessor organization, the

(MARC). During the Vietnam War, protesters at the University of Michigan forced the University to sever formal ties with Willow Run Laboratories. Research from ERIM provided technology for military surveillance, as well as information and models for better prediction and understanding of floods, fires, agricultural crops and remotely sensed information, including studies of the Bering Glacier.

Key technologies

ERIM became well known in the scientific community through a series of international conferences on remote sensing and geospatial information technologies, in the spirit of the first International Symposium on Remote Sensing of the Environment held in

in 1962. ERIM played key-roles in the development and implementation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR), at the time, an entirely new concept of radar technology. Development of an optical processing system for SAR data led

Emmett Leith Emmett Norman Leith (March 12, 1927 in Detroit, Michigan – December 23, 2005 in Ann Arbor, Michigan) was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Michigan and, with Juris Upatnieks of the University of Michigan, the co-inventor ...

, Adam Kozma and

Juris Upatnieks Juris Upatnieks (born 7 May 1936 in Riga) is a Latvian-American physicist and inventor, and pioneer in the field of holography. Upatnieks fled the Latvia with his parents at the close of World War II, seeking asylum in Germany. In 1951 the famil ...

to use the newly invented laser in conjunction with the holographic theories outlined by Dennis Gabor. Leith and Upatnieks developed a practical technique for wave-front recording and reconstruction using lasers, thereby making possible the field now known as holography. Holograms have since found a wide variety of applications.

Corporate history

In 1997, claiming an inability to compete with for-profit industry, President Peter Banks and ERIM's board of trustees spun off a for-profit

subsidiary A subsidiary, subsidiary company or daughter company is a company owned or controlled by another company, which is called the parent company or holding company. Two or more subsidiaries that either belong to the same parent company or having a s ...

under the name ERIM International, Incorporated. Nearly all of ERIM's R&D work and contracts moved to the for-profit entity, while the buildings, property, and a small fraction of personnel and contracts were retained by the not-for-profit ERIM. Banks and many board members allotted themselves high numbers of shares in the new for-profit venture, which were exercised for considerable sums when ERIM International, Inc. was sold to Veridian Corp. of Washington, D.C. in 1999. Veridian was later bought by General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems in 2003, and the heritage-ERIM part of the organization became its Michigan Research and Development Center (MRDC) and moved from Ann Arbor to nearby Ypsilanti. Proceeds from the sale of ERIM International were used by the not-for-profit ERIM to acquire Center for Electronic Commerce (CEC), another Ann Arbor not for profit in 1998. ERIM acquired Vector Research, Inc. (VRI) in 2001 to form the

, headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan. On October 1, 2006,

Michigan Technological University Michigan Technological University (Michigan Tech, MTU, or simply Tech) is a public research university in Houghton, Michigan, founded in 1885 as the Michigan Mining School, the first post-secondary institution in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. ...

purchased the Altarum Institute's Environmental and Emerging Technologies Division (EETD), which was mostly comprised by the heritage-ERIM portion of the Institute, to form the

(MTRI). The Altarum Institute is a nonprofit now solely focused on health systems research, while the environmental and remote sensing research continues at MTRI. On October 3, 2014, MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA), Canadian corporation, completed the acquisition of the Ypsilanti, Michigan building and employees therein from General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems.''MDA completes strategic capability acquisition in the United States''
/ref> With MDA's corporate restructuring following the acquisition of

Digital Globe DigitalGlobe is an American commercial vendor of space imagery and geospatial content, and operator of civilian remote sensing spacecraft. The company Initial public offering, went public on the New York Stock Exchange on 14 May 2009, selling 1 ...

in 2017, this line of business was shifted into the newly-formed subsidiary Radiant Solutions .

References

External links