William Gelbart

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Professor William Gelbart is an irrepressibly enthusiastic and enormously effective teacher-scholar. These are not two separate aspects of his being that have been somehow blended, but they are simply one. He has what has been referred to as a “magical way of relating to students… with a seemingly endless capacity to help students understand concepts, from the very basic to the most sophisticated.” More than just understand, students actually enjoy chemistry and science in general as he so obviously does.

“Like other entering freshmen, I loathed and feared chemistry. My intentions were just to do the problems. I came to office hours to see what problems he addressed and emphasized; instead, I found myself comprehending and visualizing what I had previously done mechanically. Throughout my life, I had developed an attitude that grades were most important. I tried very hard to do well in Professor Gelbart’s class, but it was not just the grade that motivated me. I wanted very much for him to be proud of me. He spent a lot of time explaining the material to me, sometimes even answering the same question over and over again. Never once did he mind or hesitate to teach. More importantly to me, he never made me feel less than competent. I wanted to prove him right.”

As a teacher of research, and key player in the graduate education enterprise more generally, Gelbart’s effectiveness is apparent. “Gelbart cares what his students are doing. Through his enthusiasm and energy, I learned to love my work, and I learned that science is vitally important. At conferences, he would introduce his students with pride, with care to describe what the student is working on. I always knew Bill trusted me with my work, that it was my work, that I was to learn from it and grow.”

Gelbart’s impact on former students who are now teachers is particularly revealing. One who is now teaching at the university level makes this clear: “When I became involved in the education of young people, I began to understand how difficult it is to teach and provide guidance without harming the student’s self-respect and their ability for independent and creative thinking. Gelbart managed to strike this difficult balance in a way which serves as a shining example to us all.”

Gelbart has been recognized nationally and internationally as a scholar and a teacher. In 1970, Gelbart was awarded a National Science Foundation – NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship to do independent research at the University of Paris, France where he was subsequently invited to return as a visiting professor in 1977 and 1983. He has been named to the Advisory Editorial Boards of several chemistry and physics research journals, organized many international colloquia in the field of complex fluids and presented his research findings in hundreds of publications and invited talks.

Gelbart’s distinguished career has been marked by many awards. He received the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Lennard-Jones Medal of the British Royal society and the Bard College Distinguished Science Lecturer award. UCLA has recognized Gelbart with the Glenn T. Seaborg Award, the Hanson-Dow Distinguished Teaching Award and the H.N. McCoy Award.