Lennard-Jones Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Guggenheim Fellowship for Natural Sciences, Liquids Prize of the American Chemical Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences Member, Glenn T. Seaborg Medal
Gelbart's early interest in science was inspired by his time as an undergraduate researcher in the molecular spectroscopy group of William Klemperer at Harvard. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, with his mentors Stuart A. Rice, Karl Freed, and Joshua Jortner, he developed the modern theory of non-radiative processes ("radiationless transitions") in molecular photophysics.[1][2] He was a US National Science Foundation/NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at the, University of Paris in 1971, and a Miller Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley in 1972, during which time he switched fields and formulated a general theory of collision-induced optical properties of simple fluids.[3]
He was appointed Assistant Professor of Chemistry, at UC Berkeley in 1972, continuing his researches on the quantum mechanical theory of molecular spectroscopy[4] and on the statistical mechanical theory of intermolecular and multiple light scattering in liquids away from and near their critical points.[5][6] He moved to UCLA as Associate Professor of Chemistry in 1975, and was promoted to full Professor in 1979 and to Distinguished Professor in 1999. He was Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA from 2000-2004 and has been a member of UCLA's California NanoSystems Institute since 2004 and of its Molecular Biology Institute from 2008.
During a sabbatical year in 1998-99 at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in UC Santa Barbara and at the Curie Institute in Paris, Gelbart became deeply intrigued by viruses and over the course of the next several years, with his UCLA colleague Charles Knobler, established a laboratory to investigate simple viruses outside their hosts and isolated in test tubes. Early results included: the first measurement of pressure inside DNA viruses, establishing that it is as high as tens of atmospheres depending on genome length and ambient salt concentrations;[9] and the demonstration that capsid proteins from certain viruses are capable of complete in vitro packaging of a broad range of lengths of heterologousRNA.[10] This work, along with that of several other groups in the United States and Europe, helped launch the field of "physical virology". Most recently he moved his viruses from test tubes to host cells, and from wildtype viruses to artificial viruses and virus-like particles, engineered for purposes of delivering self-replicating RNA genes, RNA vaccines, and therapeutic microRNA to targeted mammalian cells.[11]
^Gelbart, W. M.; Freed, K. F.; Rice, S. A. (1970). "Internal Rotation and the Breakdown of the Adiabatic Approximation: Many-Phonon Radiationless Transitions". J. Chem. Phys. 52 (5): 2460–73. Bibcode:1970JChPh..52.2460G. doi:10.1063/1.1673329.
^Gelbart, W. M.; Avouris, P.; El-Sayed, M. A. (1977). "Nonradiative Electronic Relaxation under Collision-Free Conditions". Chem. Rev. 77 (6): 793–833. doi:10.1021/cr60310a002.
^Gelbart, W. M.; Heller, D. F.; Elert, M. L. (1975). "Decays, Recurrences, and Large Molecule Behavior in the Theory of Radiationless Transitions". Chem. Phys. 7 (1): 116–22. Bibcode:1975CP......7..116G. doi:10.1016/0301-0104(75)85031-2.
^Oxtoby, D. W.; Gelbart, W. M. (1974). "Shear Viscosity and Order Parameter Dynamics of Fluids Near the Critical Point". J. Chem. Phys. 61 (7): 2957–63. Bibcode:1974JChPh..61.2957O. doi:10.1063/1.1682439.
^See review: Garmann, R. F.; Comas-Garcia, M.; Knobler, C. M.; Gelbart, W. M. (2015). "Physical Principles in the Self-Assembly of a Simple Spherical Virus". Acc. Chem. Res. 49 (1): 48–55. doi:10.1021/acs.accounts.5b00350. PMID26653769.
^US patent US9605031B2, W. M. Gelbart; C. M. Knobler & R. F. Garmann et al., "In Vitro Reconstituted Plant Virus Capsids for Delivering RNA Genes to Mammalian Cells", published 2015-05-21, issued 2017-03-28, assigned to University of California
