2017 – Professor William Gelbart, UCLA

Professor William Gelbart was trained as a physical chemical theorist, obtaining his BS at Harvard University (1967) and his PhD at the University of Chicago (1970), working on molecular spectroscopy theory. After two years of postdoctoral work – 1971 at the University of Paris and 1972 at UC Berkeley – he joined the Berkeley faculty in 1972, continuing his researches on the quantum theory of photochemistry. Prof. Gelbart moved to UCLA in 1975, switched fields, and became a leader in the then‐emerging field of “complex fluids”, contributing significantly to the statistical mechanical theory of liquid crystals, polymer solutions, colloids, and self‐assembling systems. Fifteen years ago he became deeply intrigued by viruses and, with his colleague Charles M. Knobler, established a laboratory to investigate simple viruses outside their hosts and isolated in test tubes. This work, along with that of several other groups in the States and Europe, helped launch the burgeoning field of “physical virology”. Prof. Gelbart’s interdisciplinary research has been recognized by many awards, including the 1991 Lennard‐Jones Medal of the British Royal Society, a 1998 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2001 Liquids Prize of the American Chemical Society, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009, and endowed lectureships at the University of Leeds (England) (1988), the Curie Institute (Paris) (1999), Case Western Reserve University (2002), Cornell University (2006), Carnegie Mellon University (2010), and the University of Pittsburgh (2012). At UCLA he won the 1996 University Distinguished Teaching Award, and served as Chair of Chemistry and Biochemistry from 2000 to 2004. In 2016 he was recognized by a festschrift issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry and by an international workshop in his honor, entitled “Self-Assembly, from Atoms to Life”. Prof. Gelbart is currently UCLA Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute and Molecular Biology Institute at UCLA. He is married to author and Occidental College history professor Dr. Nina Gelbart and they have a son and a daughter and three grandchildren.