William Martin Gelbart (September 11, 1945 - August 11, 2015) was an American geneticist and a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University.
[1] Gelbart did his postdoctoral work with Edward B. Lewis at Caltech and Art Chovnick at the University of Connecticut.
His research was focused on molecular basis of pattern formation using the fruit fly as a model system.
Using transvection, his group identified decapentaplegic, an locus containing an ortholog of human bone morphogenetic proteins.
[5][1] Gelbart was a major leader in consolidating the findings of the Drosophila community into FlyBase along with Michael Ashburner, Rachel Drysdale, Gerry Rubin, Thom Kaufman and Kathy Matthews.