The Gordon Research Conference on Bioorganic Chemistry was founded in 1992 to bring together scientists from a range of disciplines to present and discuss cutting-edge research at the interface between chemistry and biology. It highlights both fundamental and applied research relevant to academia and industry. To maintain a balance between these areas, the conference is organized by two co-chairs, one from academia and one from industry. The conference emphasizes the presentation of techniques or approaches that are broadly applicable across multiple areas of chemical and biological research. Traditionally, small molecules that probe, modulate, or mimic cellular components or processes as well as studies of biology at the molecular level have been of particular interest.

The 2011 conference showcased research at the frontiers of bioorganic chemistry in the areas of neuroscience and neurodegenerative disease, bioenergy, light-driven probes of biological processes, biological imaging, high throughput screening, tropical diseases, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, drug discovery, and chemical biology.

The poster sessions were intellectually robust, featuring 115 spectacular presentations, a number of which were featured as short talks in the program. Congratulations to our graduate student and postdoctorate poster competition award winners: Wenjing Wang (Michigan State University), Ratika Krishnamurty (University of Washington), Genevieve van de Bittner (University of California, Berkeley), Jiaoyang Jiang (Harvard Medical School), Leah Witus (University of California, Berkeley), Kimberly Beatty (University of California, Berkeley), Kabirul Islam (Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center), Francine Morris (Johns Hopkins University), Khalilah Reddie (Georgia Institute of Technology), Raman Bahal (Carnegie Mellon University), Jordan Meier (California Institute of Technology), and Akimasa Yoshimura (Osaka University).