Harvard Medical School, The Deafness Research Foundation, The National Organization for Hearing Research, and The University of California, San Diego are sponsoring the 7th Conference on the Molecular Biology of Hearing and Deafness. The meeting will be held at the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, from June 20-23, 2009, and will be organized by the Boston auditory research community. It will emphasize recent advances in genome-wide biology and how this area may contribute to translational research in the auditory system.