Continuing its tradition of excellence, this Gordon Conference will focus on research at the forefront of the field of defects in semiconductors. The conference will have a strong emphasis on the control of defects during growth and processing, as well as an emphasis on the development of novel defect detection methods and first-principles defect theories. Electronic, magnetic, and optical properties of bulk, thin film, and nanoscale semiconductors will be discussed in detail. In contrast to many conferences, which tend to focus on specific semiconductors, this conference will deal with point and extended defects in a broad range of electronic materials. This approach has proved to be extremely fruitful for advancing fundamental understanding in emerging materials such as wide-band-gap semiconductors, oxides, sp² carbon based-materials, and photovoltaic/solar cell materials, and in understanding important defect phenomena such as doping bottleneck in nanostructures and the diffusion of defects and impurities. The program consists of about twenty invited talks and a number of contributed poster sessions. The emphasis should be on work which has yet to be published. The large amount of discussion time provides an ideal forum for dealing with topics that are new and/or controversial.