A 1949 graduate of Lawrenceburg High School (Kentucky),[2] his undergraduate and graduate degrees were earned from MIT (B.S., 1953, and Ph.D. in geophysics, 1956), and he continued at MIT as a postdoctoral fellow until 1957, when he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles.

At UCLA he was an assistant, then associate, professor, but left to take an appointment as a senior researcher at Texas Instruments.

He died due to complications resulting from a car accident in Southern Oregon on August 15, 2014.

By the early 1970s it was clear that better data from long-period seismometers was needed for this kind of work.

Gilbert convinced geophysicist/philanthropist Cecil Green to fund a network of seismometers designed to provide data for global studies of the Earth.