The STEC Center is based at Michigan State University (MSU) in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and has previously been supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through the Food and Waterborne Diseases Integrated Research Network (FWD IRN), Microbiology Research Unit (MRU) (Research contract N01-AI30058) as well as Michigan State University.

The STEC Center was originally created by Thomas S. Whittam, while the isolate and literature databases were designed by Robert Mangold and re-organized by Weihong Qi, who also designed and implemented the EcMLST system.