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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.Gilbert was born in Vincennes, Indiana. A 1949 graduate of Lawrenceburg High School (Kentucky), 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.In his later years, Gilbert enjoyed extensive world travel with his wife, Sally Gilbert. He died due to complications resulting from a car accident in Southern Oregon on August 15, 2014. He was 83 years old.