William Michael Gelbart (born June 12, 1946) is Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute and the UCLA Molecular Biology Institute. He obtained his Bachelor of Science degree from Harvard University in 1967, his Master's (1968) and PhD (1970) degrees from the University of Chicago, and did postdoctoral work at the University of Paris (1971) and the University of California, Berkeley (1972). After 30 years of research in theoretical physical chemistry, contributing notably to the fields of gas-phase photophysics, optical properties of simple liquids, and the statistical physics of complex fluids, he started a biophysics laboratory with Charles Knobler in 2002 to investigate the physical aspects of viral infectivity. Education and career Gelbart's early interest in science was inspired by his time as an undergraduate researcher in the molecular spectroscopy group of William Klemperer at Harvard. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, with his mentors Stuart A. Rice, Karl Freed, and Joshua Jortner, he developed the modern theory of non-radiative processes ("radiationless transitions") in molecular photophysics. He was a US National Science Foundation/NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at the, University of Paris in 1971, and a Miller Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley in 1972, during which time he switched fields and formulated a general theory of collision-induced optical properties of simple fluids. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Chemistry, at UC Berkeley in 1972, continuing his researches on the quantum mechanical theory of molecular spectroscopy and on the statistical mechanical theory of intermolecular and multiple light scattering in liquids away from and near their critical points. He moved to UCLA as Associate Professor of Chemistry in 1975, and was promoted to full Professor in 1979 and to Distinguished Professor in 1999. He was Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA from 2000-2004 and has been a member of UCLA's California NanoSystems Institute since 2004 and of its Molecular Biology Institute from 2008. At UCLA he became a leader in the then-emerging fields of "complex fluids" and " soft matter physics". Shortly after moving there he began a 40-year collaboration with Avinoam Ben-Shaul on statistical-thermodynamic models of liquid crystal systems, polymer and polyelectrolyte (in particular, DNA) solutions, and colloidal suspensions, and on the self-assembly theory of micelles, surfactant monolayers, and biological membranes. During a sabbatical year in 1998-99 at the Institute for