James Freeman Gilbert

Who was James Freeman Gilbert?

James Freeman Gilbert was an American geophysicist, best known for his work with George E. Backus on inverting geophysical data, and also for his role in establishing an international network of long-period seismometers.

Gilbert was born in Vincennes, Indiana. His undergraduate and graduate degrees were earned from MIT, and he continued at MIT as a postdoctoral fellow until 1957, when he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles. At UCLA he was an assistant, then associate, professor, but left to take an appointment as a senior researcher at Texas Instruments. In 1961, he was recruited by Walter Munk to the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, also becoming a professor of Geophysics at the University of California, San Diego. He remained at UCSD through the remainder of his career, and became an Emeritus Professor.

Gilbert was among the first to recognize that the free oscillations of the Earth could be measured immediately following large earthquakes, and could be used to produce structural models of the inner earth.