Duties: Charles (Tom) Decker (CPT, Ret, USA.), Operational Energy Program Manager, U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, Engineer Research Development Center, Construction Engineering Research Laboratory in Champaign, IL. Tom has over twenty years’ experience in Operational Energy.  The majority of his experience comes from his Army enlisted time as a Prime Power NCO in the 249th Engineer Battalion for eight years (1996-2005). Tom’s last active duty assignment as a CPT was as the Operational Energy lead to Contingency Base program at ERDC-CERL from 2011 to 2014.  In November 2014 Tom was hired by ERDC-CERL to continue the research he started in Operational Energy.  Since 2011, he has been an instrumental part of the Operational Energy Working Group and various other Army and DOD lead Operational Energy efforts. Tom has a mixture of technical knowledge of Operational Energy and 22 years of Army service that make him essential for providing immediate operational feedback and impacts of different proposed courses of actions. Tom’s operational experience includes a 45 day deployment to Afghanistan in 2012, where he served as a subject matter expert to an assessment team that assessed the role of an Operational Energy advisor assigned to a Brigade Combat Team (BCT).  In addition to this deployment, Tom has multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as multiple humanitarian relief deployments for the Corp of Engineers in order to restore power.  Tom’s day to day duties range from leading projects such as Deployable Metering and Monitoring System (DMMS) and Hybrid Power Trailer (HPT), as well as active roles in Operational Energy / Contingency Base test beds serving as the program manager for ERDC Forward Operating Base Laboratory (EFOB-L) and power manager for the Contingency Base Integration Training Evaluation Center (CBITEC), as well as providing subject matter support to Tactical Micro grid Standards Consortium (TMSC), and OSD community of practice weekly working groups.  Most recently serving an increased role in international Operational Energy communities of practice for the United Nations and NATO, to include recent deployments to Africa to support both organizations.

Biographical Sketch: 

Education

• M.S., Engineer Management, University of Missouri S&T

• B.S., Engineer Management, Park University

Employment History

Nov 2014– Present, U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center, Construction Engineering Research Laboratory, Champaign, IL as Operational Energy Program Manager

1992-2015- US Army

Professional Activities: 

• Society of American Military Engineers (SAME), member