James Freeman Gilbert

James Freeman Gilbert ( born August 9, 1931 in Vincennes, Indiana) is an American geophysicist.

Gilbert studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where in 1953 he took his bachelor's degree in 1956 and a Ph.D. in geophysics. Then he went to the University of California, Los Angeles ( UCLA), where he was an Assistant Professor in 1957 and 1960 Associate Professor. 1960/61, he was a research geophysicist at Texas Instruments. From 1961 he was professor at the University of California, San Diego, and at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics ( IGPP ) of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Associate Director, he was from 1976 to 1988. Since 2001 he is a professor emeritus. In 1987, he worked as a Fairchild Scholar at Caltech, 1973 Visiting Professor in Utrecht ( veining - Meinesz Institute for Geophysics ) and 1964 /65 and 1972/73 as a Guggenheim Fellow at the University of Cambridge.

Gilbert was one of the discoverers of the free vibration modes of the earth, which he took in 1970 with Adam Dziewoński from the analysis of data from the Alaska earthquake of 1964 and later the earthquake in Colombia. About the same time also managed the Frank Press and Maurice Ewing. He developed with George E. Backus Backus -Gilbert method of inversion of seismic data. In the early 1970s he was involved in the installation of a global network of seismometers to study the Earth's interior, the International Deployment of Accelerometers (IDA ) array whose first 40 stations in 1974 went into operation.

In 1981 he received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1999, the William Bowie Medal, the 1990 Balzan Prize, 1985, the Arthur L. Day Medal of the Geological Society of America in 2004 and the Medal of the Seismological Society of America. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Utrecht and the Colorado School of Mines. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

He has been married since 1959 and has three children.