Theoretical Physics in UC Santa Barbara and at the Curie Institute in Paris, Gelbart became deeply intrigued by viruses and over the course of the next several years, with his UCLA colleague Charles Knobler, established a laboratory to investigate simple viruses outside their hosts and isolated in test tubes. Early results included: the first measurement of pressure inside DNA viruses, establishing that it is as high as tens of atmospheres depending on genome length and ambient salt concentrations; and the demonstration that capsid proteins from certain viruses are capable of complete in vitro packaging of a broad range of lengths of heterologous RNA. This work, along with that of several other groups in the United States and Europe, helped launch the field of "physical virology". Most recently he moved his viruses from test tubes to host cells, and from wildtype viruses to artificial viruses and virus-like particles, engineered for purposes of delivering self-replicating RNA genes, RNA vaccines, and therapeutic microRNA to targeted mammalian cells. Awards In 1987 Gelbart was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society "for his many contributions to the light scattering and phase transition properties of simple fluids, liquid crystals, and surfactant solutions". He received the 1991 Lennard-Jones Prize of the British Royal Society of Chemistry, a 1998 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2001 Liquids Prize of the American Chemical Society, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009, and endowed lectureships over the past 25 years at the Curie Institute (Paris), the University of Leeds (England), Case Western Reserve University, Cornell University, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Texas at Austin. At UCLA he won the 1996 University Distinguished Teaching Award, served as Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry (2000-2004), and was awarded the Glenn T. Seaborg Medal in 2017. In 2016, his 70th birthday was honored by an international symposium on "Self Assembly, from Atoms to Life" at the Meso-American Center for Theoretical Physics, and by a "festschrift" issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry B. References External links Journal of Physical Chemistry B Festschrift Biography of William Gelbart Glenn T. Seaborg Medal 2017 1946 births Living people University of California, Los Angeles faculty Harvard University alumni University of Chicago alumni Biochemists Physical chemistry Physical chemists Fellows of the American Physical Society