James Freeman Gilbert

James Freeman Gilbert (August 9, 1931 – August 15, 2014) 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. his undergraduate and graduate degrees were earned from MIT (B.S., 1953, and Ph.D. in geophysics, 1956), 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 (IGPP) 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.