After the war ended, Bethe returned to Cornell. In June 1947, he participated in the Shelter Island Conference. Sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and held at the Ram's Head Inn on Shelter Island, New York, the conference on the "Foundations of Quantum Mechanics" was the first major physics conference held after the war. It was a chance for American physicists to come together, pick up where they had left off before the war, and establish the direction of post-war research.