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J. Freeman Gilbert is 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 has remained at UCSD and is now 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. In collaboration with Adam Dziewonski, he applied these ideas first to seismic records from the 1964 Alaska earthquake and then to records from the 1970 Colombia earthquake. In this context he and Backus developed robust methods for inverting seismic data.
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