If you’ve passed a group of individuals taking a midday walk down Lawrence Street to Bradley Lake or have wondered who all the visitors are on Proctor Academy’s campus during the summer months, you are not alone.

While students depart Proctor’s campus by the first week of June, dorms remain fully occupied and the Dining Services staff prepares thousands of meals a week for the Gordon Research Conferences, a non-profit organization managed by and for the benefit of the scientific community. Gordon Research Conferences provide an international forum for the presentation and discussion of frontier research in the biological, chemical, and physical sciences, and their related technologies.

Proctor is fortunate to be one of the few schools or colleges in New Hampshire, along with nearby Colby-Sawyer College, to host Gordon Research Conferences for 10 weeks every summer. The conferences attract world-renowned scientists from across the globe to the small town of Andover to discuss cutting-edge research and collaborate as a scientific community.

Each Sunday, between 100 and 200 conferees arrive. Some are PhD students, others postdoctoral fellows, professors, or research scientists. Topics of study range from proteoglycans to radiation chemistry.

Last year, Proctor was fortunate to host the 2013 Nobel Prize winners in physiology or medicine, when James E. Rothman of Yale and Thomas C. Südhof of Stanford, recognized for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells, were speakers at the 2013 Gordon Research Conference in molecular biology on Proctor’s campus.

Proctor is thankful for its on-going relationship with Gordon Research Conferences and for the opportunity to serve as an incubator of scientific thought during the summer months.

So, if you see strangers walking around town, take a minute to introduce yourself. You may be talking to the next Nobel Prize winner!