In October 1948, after being awarded a State Scholarship, he started an accelerated applied mathematics degree course at Imperial College of Science and Technology of the University of London.
In 1951, he be able to attend a two-week course at Cambridge University given by Dr. Maurice Wilkes, the developer of the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC).
That same year, with a special interest in calculating methods for weather forecasting, and with funding arranged by the mathematician John von Neumann, he joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey supported on United States Smith-Mundt and Fulbright programs.
He worked with Dr. Jule Charney, a gifted meteorologist and mathematician, on weather prediction calculations, programming the institute's IAS machine.
In 1955, John von Neumann left the Institute for Advanced Study to join the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and so, in the summer of 1956, the group Gilchrist had been working with, broke up.
In 1966 he was elected president of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) [7] and later served as its executive director from 1968 to 1973.
[citation needed] Gilchrist had five grandchildren with Littlefield: Ian (spouse Kelly Murphy), Juliann, Anthony(Archaeologist), Carson, and Griffin.