Gabrielse became a postdoc at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1978 under Hans Dehmelt,[4] and joined the faculty in 1985.
In 2018, Gabrielse moved to Northwestern University, becoming the director of the newly created Center for Fundamental Physics at Low Energy.
[7] Gabrielse was a pioneer in the field of low energy antiproton and antihydrogen physics by proposing the trapping of antiprotons from a storage ring, cooling them in collisions with trapped electrons,[8] and the use of these to form low energy antihydrogen atoms.
[11] The demonstrations and methods made possible an effort that grew to involve 4 international collaborations of physicists working at CERN's Antiproton Decelerator.
[12] The precision of the resulting confirmation of the Standard Model prediction exceeded that of earlier comparisons by nearly a factor of 106.
[1] In 2014, Gabrielse, as part of the ACME collaboration with John Doyle at Harvard and David DeMille at Yale, measured the electron electric dipole moment to over an order of magnitude over the previous measurement using a beam of thorium monoxide,[23] a result which had implications for the viability of supersymmetry.
[25] Gabrielse was also one of the discoverers of the Brown-Gabrielse invariance theorem,[26] relating the free space cyclotron frequency to the measureable eigenfrequencies of an imperfect Penning trap.
[28] Gabrielse has also invented a self-shielding superconducting solenoid that uses flux conservation and a carefully chosen geometry of coupled coils to cancel strong field fluctuations due to external sources.