Founding Father

Even as a teenager, Neil Elbridge Gordon had a knack for bringing scientists together. More than a quarter-century before he launched what would become known as the Gordon Research Conferences, he cut his scientific organizing teeth putting together a science club as a student at Homer High School in upstate New York. This early success was a taste of things to come from Gordon, a passionate promoter of chemistry and chemical education.

Born in 1886, Gordon earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy and a master's degree in mathematics from Syracuse University before completing his Ph.D. in chemistry at Johns Hopkins University in 1917.

While attending his first American Chemical Society meeting in the spring of 1921, Gordon, then a young faculty member at Maryland State Agricultural College in College Park, was inspired by a talk on undergraduate research. By the time the leaves had turned that year, he had spearheaded the formation of what would later become the ACS Division of Chemical Education. To disseminate the division's efforts, Gordon launched the Journal of Chemical Education in 1924. Soon after, he was recruited back to Johns Hopkins to take up a newly endowed chair in chemical education.

It was during this time that Gordon turned his considerable organizational skills to bear on scientific conferences. He reinvented an established departmental summer conference series, moving it to Gibson Island in nearby Chesapeake Bay. The new meetings proved a huge success and marked the birth of what are now known as the Gordon Research Conferences. Gordon continued to build and champion the conferences for another 16 years before turning his remarkable fund-raising and managerial skills back to chemical education, among other things creating Wayne State University's Ph.D. program in chemistry and assembling the noted Kresge-Hooker scientific library. He died in 1949.

Reflecting on his colleague's many achievements, chemist Otto Reinmuth later wrote that "whatever aspirations toward scientific scholarship [Gordon] may once have entertained, he early recognized his own peculiar abilities as an organizer and promoter and subordinated all else to the furtherance of projects which he felt would advance the cause of chemistry and chemical education."