He was educated at Purley County Grammar School[5] and the University of Cambridge, where in 1969 he became a research student under the supervision of Dennis Sciama.

Having worked on classical general relativity for his PhD thesis, Gibbons focused on the quantum theory of black holes afterwards.

[10] His work in more recent years includes contributions to research on supergravity, p-branes[11] and M-theory, mainly motivated by string theory.

He played a leading role in the development of the Euclidean approach to quantum gravity and showed how it could be used to understand the thermal character of black holes and inflating universes.

In the more conventional Lorentzian approach to gravity, he has studied the behaviour of solitons in gauge theories and General Relativity and has shown how supersymmetry leads to Bogomolny inequalities on the masses and charges.